


come back again

by drunkonwriting



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Avengers Family, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt Tony Stark, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Self-Harm, Implied/Referenced Suicide, M/M, Marvel Reverse Big Bang 2019, Pre-Avengers: Age of Ultron (Movie), bucky has bad coping methods but luckily for him tony is the KING of bad coping methods, mostly pre-slash
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-22
Packaged: 2021-02-24 16:41:15
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 29,351
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21901129
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/drunkonwriting/pseuds/drunkonwriting
Summary: “This isn’t about protecting anyone,” Tony said. “He’s punishing himself and he’s using us as a good excuse to do it.”Steve stared at him. “Why would you say that?”Because I wrote the book on self-destructive behavior, Tony thought but didn’t say.tony notices something off with their newest avenger. dealing with bucky barnes and his self-destructive impulses ends up being a lot more than he bargained for.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes & Tony Stark, James "Bucky" Barnes/Tony Stark
Comments: 11
Kudos: 476
Collections: Marvel Reverse Big Bang 2019





	come back again

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Art Post: Come Back Again](https://archiveofourown.org/works/21913687) by [Lets_call_me_Lily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lets_call_me_Lily/pseuds/Lets_call_me_Lily). 



> my first submission for the marvel reversebang. this is set in a post-catws au where steve brought bucky in from the cold immediately. (also, on a lesser note, while this piece is post im3, tony hasn't gotten the arc reactor taken out.) please mind the tags - there's a lot of discussion about suicidal behavior and self-harm/bad coping methods, so if that kind of stuff is sensitive for you, this probably isn't the fic for you. and it goes without saying, but i'm not a licensed doctor and i have zero authority about dealing with mental trauma, so nothing in here should be read as proper medical care. 
> 
> big shout-out to [Lets_call_me_lily](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lets_call_me_Lily/pseuds/Lets_call_me_Lily) who created the art that inspired this piece. her art is absolutely gorgeous and i had a blast of a time writing this fic for it. also thanks to morrified for doing some last minute betaing for me! they're excellent and any mistakes you catch while reading are entirely my own.
> 
> the title is taken from the brothers karamazov; "You will burn and you will burn out; you will be healed and come back again.”

Tony’s earliest memories of Howard were the Captain America stories he would tell.

Howard had never been around much. Tony had vague memories of him on birthdays and holidays, almost always with a glass in his hand and a distant scowl on his face, but that was it until Tony turned four and built his first circuit board. After that, everything shifted in his relationship with Howard. Instead of ignoring him, Howard gave him projects to work on that he endlessly criticized and brought Tony to his workshop and to company functions. But even then, their time together was always about engineering, about science. Howard had never once spent time with Tony just to spend time with him.

When they were together, Howard rarely talked about anything outside of work. He wasn’t a demonstrative man by nature—chatty and charming with investors, a salesman to his bones, he was quiet when left to his own devices. But there were a few subjects Howard could talk about endlessly, given the chance. The first was his own genius and Stark Enterprises. The second was Captain America. 

During their sessions in Howard’s workshop, back before MIT and their endless fighting, Howard had told Tony at length all of the stories he had about Steve Rogers and his unit. By the time he was six, Tony knew the stories by heart. He knew the fights and the conversations and the mishaps and the heroism. Sometimes it felt like he’d heard about the Captain’s missions so often, he could tell the stories himself. 

The Captain was the main character, of course, but Howard’s stories were full of rotating minor characters. Some of them Tony knew already—like Aunt Peggy—and some of them were unfamiliar to him. They didn’t stay that way for long, of course. Even though Tony had never met most of them, he sometimes felt like he knew them well, like they were old friends. 

Tony had figured he was wrong about any familiarity that he’d thought he had when he’d met Steve Rogers in person. The Captain he’d come to feel like he knew—brave and selfless and kind-hearted, shy and stubborn, a good leader and tactician—wasn’t the man who spit poison in his face barely hours after meeting him. The man in Howard’s stories would never have done that. 

There was a voice that whispered in the back of his head, sounding remarkably like Howard, that maybe it wasn’t that Howard’s stories were wrong, maybe it was that Tony was just that unlikable. Maybe Tony was just so good at bringing out the worst in people, even someone like Captain America couldn’t escape it. Tony wanted to bury that voice, but it was difficult. After all, he’d always managed to bring out the worst in his own father—why would the great Captain America be any different? 

It was enough to make Tony wary of meeting any of the people from Howard’s stories. 

So when Cap had come back to the Tower after SHIELD fell with his old war buddy under one arm, Tony hadn’t exactly been thrilled even though he’d always liked the Bucky Barnes Howard described. He understood that Barnes probably wasn’t going to be anything like the guy in the stories he’d heard. For one thing, he’d been a brainwashed super-soldier for seven decades. 

Braced as he was, he had still been surprised by the sheer difference in Barnes from the guy he’d heard about. He didn’t think anyone who had some inkling of who Barnes had been before HYDRA wouldn’t be surprised at how different he was. Cold, reserved, basically a walking automaton. It was disconcerting. It made it difficult to even look at him, to talk to him. Barnes had been living in the Tower for a year, been taken off probation and put on the main Avengers team six months ago, and yet Tony still hadn’t had more than a few conversations with the guy. They weren’t friends, not even in the kind of uneasy way that Steve and Tony were friends. 

So when he started noticing the odd patterns in Barnes’s behavior, Tony had chalked it up to being one of the things that were just different about Barnes. He’d told himself that he shouldn’t be concerned about it because Barnes was just a teammate and he had other people to look out for him. 

But the thing was, Tony wasn’t just on the team for his good looks and money. He wasn’t even just on the team for his rockets and aerial support. His job was to be their eyes and ears. Clint couldn’t be everywhere and no one else had a bird’s eye view like Tony did, no one else had JARVIS monitoring every signal and radio wave and transmission, watching from any cameras that were around. Tony saw all and that meant part of his duty as an Avenger was keeping tabs on everyone.

Tony was never sure if his teammates realized the extent of his watchfulness; if Natasha realized that he was able to toss her a warning about the enemy approaching her blind spot because he’d been tracking her movements or if Steve realized he was there to catch him because he’d kept one eye on his fight and recognized the jump he was about to make. Tony had a feeling Clint knew; sometimes Hawkeye would tip him a wink after a fight, one steel-eyed watcher to another. 

And the thing was, Tony didn’t _just_ watch. Tony was their weapons supplier and armory. He always reviewed their fights afterward and spent hours up to his elbows in analysis; had the new Widow’s Bites been faster than the old ones? Had Hawkeye’s explosive arrows taken a little too long to detonate? Had Steve taken that hard hit because his armor wasn’t dense enough? Tony spent a lot of his downtime picking apart their fights and compiling information to fix those problems, figuring out what their blind spots were when he needed to make new weapons or upgrades. 

The result of so much time spent looking after his teammates meant he couldn’t just turn a blind eye to the pattern that kept repeating over and over with Barnes. At first, he’d thought it was just some unfortunate mistakes—all of them rarely came home without some kind of injury and after a while, he’d become immune to thinking of it as a problem. And Barnes was a tank, a heavy hitter who was almost always in the thick of things; of course he’d get injured more often than most.

But. _But_.

Tony had an engineer’s brain, a scientist’s brain, and it was picking up on the pattern like it was trained to do. There was something off with Barnes. There was something wrong. Tony wanted to just ignore it because it really wasn’t supposed to be his problem, but he found his mind returning to the question over and over, a bruise he couldn’t help but keep pressing. 

Eventually, he gave up and spent one afternoon reviewing past fights, all the fights they’d been in since Barnes had officially been cleared and allowed to join the team. Then, not really believing his own findings, he’d reviewed them again. And again. And again.

Then he’d sat up all night with a tumbler of scotch he didn’t drink. He’d stared at his blank monitors for hours, trying to figure out what he was supposed to do with the theory he’d just proven.

The thing was—he had no idea what to do. He needed to go to someone who did. 

* * *

He waited to talk to Steve about it because Tony had a policy and it basically boiled down to: never talk to Steve Rogers about anything too deep.

Steve and Tony did not talk about serious subjects. Oh, they could chat about the weather. They could go over strategy. They could decide what pizza to buy for movie night, could even cautiously throw around some snarky banter when they were both in a particularly good mood. But Tony had long since learned that any deeper conversation only ever led to shouting matches—exhibit A, the time Steve had tried to talk to Tony about Howard and hadn’t been at all happy to hear how much of a bastard his old war buddy had turned out to be once he became a father or exhibit B, that time Tony had broken his arm in a fight and Steve had all but accused him of recklessly endangering the team just to look good.

Yeah. Those had been fun ones, both of them.

Tony had a feeling this conversation was going to be more shouting match than friendly banter and he wasn’t looking forward to it. So he put it off. After his realization, the Avengers weren’t called out again for another month and he had half-hoped that some time would give Barnes a chance to recuperate, perhaps even heal. Tony had ignored the voice in the back of his mind that whispered exactly how long it had taken _him_ to recover. He had reasoned with himself about the whole thing endlessly—Barnes was a super-soldier, wasn’t he? He had to be better at this kind of stuff than Tony, who had never kidded himself about his self-awareness or self-preservation. He might be going through a rough patch now, but he’d recover quickly and Tony would never have to bring it up at all if he was lucky.

But then another wannabe supervillain had to put in an appearance and Tony came back with scratches but Barnes came back with a _broken leg_ and that was _it_ , Tony had had _enough_.

“We need to talk,” he said to Steve the moment the debrief with Coulson and his new team of wannabe SHIELD agents was over.

Steve’s brow furrowed, not quite a frown. “I was going to go visit Bucky,” he said.

“This can’t wait,” Tony said. “Don’t worry, Popsicle Pop will still be there in an hour.”

Steve rubbed his face. “It can’t wait?” he asked.

“No.”

Steve spared one look toward Bruce’s lab—the Avengers version of SHIELD medical now that SHIELD was in shambles—then followed Tony down to his workshop without another word of protest. 

Tony snapped his fingers and lights began popping on, the half-finished projects he’d abandoned when the alarm went on just as he left them. He put them all aside and opened the file he’d been compiling for the past month. His stomach fluttered a little as he turned to face Steve, but it didn’t matter how much he disliked Steve’s towering height or the way his fists clenched when he got angry—things couldn’t continue on this way and Steve was the best equipped to handle it.

“We need to talk about Barnes.”

Steve straightened. “About Bucky? What is it?”

Tony opened his mouth, closed it. He wasn’t quite sure how to get around to his point. Finally, he crossed his arms over his chest.

“Have you noticed anything strange about Barnes when we’re out there?”

Steve frowned. “Is this about the Winter Soldier again? Because I told you, he’s been dormant ever since we got rid of the triggers—”

“Since Princess Shuri and I got rid of the triggers, you mean,” Tony said.

Steve rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “Since you and Shuri got rid of the triggers the Soldier’s gone. He’s not coming back, you know that—”

“No it’s not about the Soldier,” Tony said. “Even though I do still think it’s stupid to pretend that the Soldier is just dormant and not a part of Barnes’s brain that can be triggered again.”

“The triggers are—”

“You don’t always need special Russian codewords to get triggered, Cap!” Tony snapped. Steve blinked at him, taken aback and frowning. “He’s riddled with PTSD, he was a POW for years—”

“He’s stronger than that,” Steve said in the low, even voice that meant he was starting to get angry. 

“It’s not about _strength_.” Tony took a deep breath. This wasn’t the fight he wanted to have. “Listen, it’s not about the Soldier, at least, I don’t think it is. Barnes is getting injured.”

That threw Steve enough to stop the building argument. “Injured?” he asked. “I know, we all just saw him—”

“Not just this time,” Tony said. “He’s been getting injured more and more _every_ time we go out.”

“And?”

Tony stared at him. “And?” he repeated, incredulous. “What do you mean, _and_?”

“What’s so different about him getting injured?” Steve crossed his arms over his chest. “We all get injured. It’s part of the job.”

Tony scowled. “It’s not the getting injured part that matters, it’s the _how often_ part that does!” he said. He waved a hand, pulling up his spreadsheets. He’d learned early on that spreadsheets were _essential_ when he was arguing with Steve fucking Rogers, the king of obstinacy. “Look! This is the injury percentage before Barnes—pretty evenly split, with some lead from the squishy humans, yours truly included.” He waved his hand again. “And _this_ is the injury percentage after Barnes. Look! He has _87%_ of the team injuries even though he’s strictly recon and backup! That’s not normal, Cap!”

Steve frowned at the numbers. “That can’t be right.”

“It _is_. He’s not just taking his fair share of the hits—he’s taking ours, too. Our last fight with Magneto? He swept in and took a hit meant for me and it gave him a goddamn concussion.”

Steve’s shoulders went up. “You aren’t seriously mad that he’s protecting you?”

Tony wanted to shake him or punch him in his perfect teeth. There had to be some kind of device scrambling whatever Tony was saying. There was no other explanation for how often Steve seemed to misunderstand him. 

“This isn’t about protecting anyone,” Tony said. “He’s punishing himself and he’s using us as a good excuse to do it.”

Steve stared at him. “Why would you say that?”

 _Because I wrote the book on self-destructive behavior,_ Tony thought but didn’t say.

“He isn’t getting hurt protecting himself,” Tony said. “Last time he was stopping Natasha from getting shot and the time before that he dislocated his shoulder fighting some HYDRA goons who were going after Clint. I’ve watched the footage, Cap, and every time he finds whoever’s fighting the biggest bad and shreds himself fighting it so that we don’t have to.”

“I still don’t get why this is a bad thing,” Steve said. “You were the one who was worried about how well he’d work with us in the field when he first started as an Avenger! But it sounds to me like he’s helping keep us safe.”

“It’s not about keeping us _safe_ ,” Tony said. He spread his hands, helpless. How could he explain this to Steve, who clearly had no framework for this kind of mindset? “At least, not entirely. Look, it’s…. He won’t hurt himself because he knows it will hurt—the people he loves. So he finds other ways to do it, ways that will still get the job done. He’s not doing this to be _helpful_ , he’s doing it because it’s the only way he can—” 

Steve shook his head. “This is paranoia,” he said firmly. “Tony, I know you didn’t really trust Bucky when he first got here and I respected that. But it’s been a year. You’ve got to get over this—this _paranoia_ you have about him.”

“He was an assassin, Steve! That’s not paranoia, that’s just common sense. But that’s not what this is about, I’m trying to _help_ Barnes—”

“By trying to convince me he’s only protecting us out of some twisted need to hurt himself?” Steve asked. “What’s next, we stop letting him go out and fight?”

Tony was silent for too long. Steve’s eyebrows rose and his mouth set in a hard, disappointed frown.

“I can’t believe you’d pull this, Tony,” he said. “Bucky broke his leg saving _you_.” 

“I know,” Tony snapped. He would see Barnes leaping off that building for the rest of his life, probably. “That’s why I won’t sit around and let him kill himself.”

“He’s not _killing_ himself,” Steve said, though there was a deep wrinkle in his forehead. “You must be—misinterpreting somehow.” He rubbed the back of his neck, shoulders going up. “Bucky’s always been protective.”

Tony didn’t know how to handle this level of self-delusion. He had no patience for it. 

“Being _protective_ my ass!” he exploded. “He’s trying to _kill himself_ , Cap!”

Steve’s expression iced over. “He would never do that,” he said. “Not Bucky.” He took a deep breath. Tony really didn’t appreciate that Steve somehow felt like Tony was being the antagonizing one right now. “I appreciate your… concern, Tony. I know you must have Bucky’s best interests at heart. But he’s fine. There’s nothing to worry about.”

Tony wanted to shake him. “Damn it, Cap. You have to _listen_ to me. If you don’t try to fix this, your best buddy’s not just going to come out of these scuffles with a broken leg,” he said. “He’ll come out of them in a body bag.”

Steve’s jaw clenched. “I’m done talking about this.”

He turned and marched out. Tony slumped down in the nearest chair, rubbing his face. Well, he thought sardonically, that had gone _so great_. 

* * *

The thing was, Tony would have left it at that. Barnes was emphatically not Tony’s responsibility—that had been made clear to him from day one. Barnes was Steve’s in the same way the Spiderkid was Tony’s and they had decided on joint mutual custody over the rest of the Avengers. (Except Natasha, who they firmly agreed had custody of herself.) Tony had been fine with that. Barnes and all his baggage belonged with his old war buddy and Tony had enough on his plate corralling all the new super kids popping up in New York. 

Tony would have been content to let Steve take Barnes in hand—if Barnes was pulling anything except this self-destructive bullshit. Tony could make himself look the other way when it came to Barnes’ trauma and panic attacks and general paranoia—it was easy, almost, since looking too closely at Barnes always made Tony aware of how much they had in common and that was enough to make him break out in hives. But Tony was too many years out of Afghanistan and New York to be able to stand by and watch someone self-destruct, especially when the method they were using might as well have his patent on it. 

But Steve railroaded Tony for a full week after their fight about Barnes, refusing to listen every time he brought it up. Tony used all of the tactics he’d prototyped on Pepper, but either Steve was more stubborn or Pepper had been letting him off easy. Without Steve to act as a go-between, Tony would have to talk to Barnes himself and, embarrassingly enough, Tony had no idea how to do that.

For the year he’d lived in the Tower, Barnes and Tony largely communicated through Steve. Even during the months of arduous arm repairs after Barnes first moved in, during the uneasy time following SHIELD’s fall, Steve had been their messenger boy. He was the one to relay some necessary updates to Tony or stand by as Tony did his fixes and make comments on Barnes’ behalf. So even though Tony knew Barnes had lost his Brooklyn drawl to a mish-mash Russian accent and had a side-stepping, bitingly black sense of humor, he’d barely said ten words to the man without Steve hovering in the background like a mama cat with a new kitten.

And it wasn’t like there was anyone else to recruit to help him, either. Barnes wasn’t friendly with too many people in the Tower. Clint had once called him their stray cat and he wasn’t far off—Barnes came and went as he liked, slinking in and out of rooms without so much as a word to anyone else. Tony had no real idea how to deal with him and nobody else really did either.

Tony could still have taken a crack at it, of course. A lifetime living in the public eye, not to mention being the CEO of Stark Industries, meant that he had a pretty strong set of social skills. But it was difficult to even imagine talking directly to Barnes, having a conversation with him. What would he even _say_?

It wasn’t the muteness that was a problem—Tony had never had any trouble filling an awkward silence before—it was his utter blankness. Howard’s stories had always painted a very decisive picture of Bucky Barnes: ladies man, flirt, and an all-around charmer. After Steve had brought Barnes in from the cold, Tony had found it more disorienting than he’d expected to be faced with this stoic killer who hadn’t, in Tony’s memory, cracked that famous smile once in the year he’d lived in the Tower instead of the charming boy from all the stories.

If that man was still in there, somewhere, he was buried under too much ice it might be impossible to thaw him out—a fucking shame because Tony could have probably talked to that guy. But he was stuck with the feral cat and Tony had never really done that well with animals. He vaguely remembered some hamsters that had all run away and a disastrous attempt at a puppy that had ended in tears all around. 

Tony might have waffled for weeks, caught between the itch between his shoulder blades at the thought of Barnes punishing himself and his own instinctive distaste of anything that approached an emotional conversation. Past experience had proven Tony an expert procrastinator when it came to things he really, really didn’t want to do.

But then the great city of New York found itself under attack by yet another power-hungry scientist with too many ideas and not enough ethical boundaries and Tony found that putting it off really wasn’t an option anymore.

* * *

Tony had been told more than once—by Obie, by Pepper, by Rhodey, by exasperated protestors and annoyed colleges and his own mother, once upon a time—that there was a right time and a wrong time to say ‘I told you so.’ Tony wasn’t sure any of them had imagined this particular scenario, but even Tony Stark, king of insensitive pricks, knew better than to say it while Barnes was still battling it out in surgery. 

If he was honest, he didn’t even really _want_ to say it. He felt vaguely sick. Steve hadn’t said a word since Bruce had taken Barnes into his lab. His face was distant and blank. Tony should probably be comforting him, but he didn’t know what to say, or how he could fix what had gone wrong so quickly and drastically.

It hadn’t started out looking like a dangerous mission in the slightest. The scientist they’d gotten a red alert about had been one of those take over the world types that never seemed to realize they would have no idea what to do with the world once they had it. Tony had standards. If someone was going to go the world domination route, they should at least have a better plan than throwing some bombs and hoping for the best.

This guy had had some souped-up guns cobbled together by that fucking Chitauri tech, which had only added insult to injury. Tony had personally overseen New York’s clean up to try and prevent people from cobbling together their own superweapons, but there had been just too much of it—something always fell through the cracks and into the hands of idiots who had no idea how dangerous it was.

Still, despite the grade-A weapons, the guy had been laughably small time. Probably a good thing considering Thor was still off doing something godly and king-like on Asgard, Natasha and Clint had been recruited by Coulson to help with some skirmish overseas, and the rest of the team had been called in yesterday to help out the X-men, leaving just Tony, Steve, Bruce, and Barnes on the active-duty roster. They’d arrived after getting the call to find the so-called villain in the middle of downtown traffic. 

Tony had taken one look at the guy and started cackling; between the lank hair, skinny shoulders, and huge guns, he was basically a walking stereotype. 

“Iron Man,” Steve had said, stern.

“Just _look_ at him, Cap,” Tony had said. “Come on. The only reason we’re on this is because the Mayor’s still pissed about all those buildings that went down last month.”

Steve hadn’t responded, which was as good as an agreement with him.

“I _am_ still sorry about that,” Bruce had said from where he had been sitting pretty in the parked Quinjet as their backup. “I didn’t mean to knock so many of them down.”

“Never be sorry for destroying half of Wall Street, pumpkin,” Tony had said. “My only regret is that you didn’t get to take down Trump Tower.”

“Ditto.” Barnes talked so rarely on comms that Tony had almost jumped at his rough, quiet input. “Would’ve served that dick right.”

“Chatter,” Steve had said. “Come on, Soldier. We’ll flank him. Hulk, you sit tight. We probably won’t need you, but better to be safe. Iron Man….” Steve had sighed. “Just keep an eye on us from above, all right?”

Tony had given him a flimsy salute and taken to the skies as Steve and Barnes had begun their approach. 

Steve had been the one to try to talk the scientist down since he was always the negotiator when Natasha was out of town. Tony had hovered in the air above them, mostly idly wondering what he’d do for dinner and if he could get those new StarkPhone specs done tonight so he could spend tomorrow playing with exploding arrows. He’d barely spared ten percent of his attention to the battle below him, confident in how little this guy deserved to be treated like a threat.

Honestly, Tony should have known better.

He still wasn’t sure how Steve had gone down. All he knew was one moment he was listening to the soft, cajoling voice Steve always used on the truly insane ones, and the next there was screaming in his ear. Tony had dropped on instinct, covering the downed Steve before he even really knew what to protect him from. He’d looked up to a blast of an EMP that sent all of his suit’s systems haywire. Before he could stabilize to get them back online, he took another blast—and Tony would be spending days in the lab in the near future trying to figure out what exactly it was because he knew it sure as hell wasn’t an EMP—that had caused the suit to lock up. 

Tony had installed emergency evacuation measures into the suit from the very first Mark; the thought of being suffocated in a tin can had been a recurring nightmare that had only gotten worse after New York. But even though he stood by those measures, they were damn inconvenient when they ejected him onto the street wearing only his undersuit to face a madman who was apparently much more dangerous than Tony had accounted for.

The scientist had grinned, mouthed off about having the famous Tony Stark at his mercy and raised one of his Chitauri guns. Tony had ducked the first blast by instinct, but the second had been too fast. He’d braced himself for it, sparing a second to be thankful it wasn’t aimed for his heart, when something had come hurtling between it and him. 

Barnes had gone down hard, but he wasn’t a world-class soldier for nothing—he’d managed to get the scientist right in the shoulder even as he took a hit to the stomach. Tony had watched him go down in horror, barely able to move. It was only when Bruce had rushed past him, shouting, that Tony had been able to recover himself. 

He and Bruce had worked together getting both supersoldiers back to the Quinjet so they could hurry back to the Tower. The new SHIELD had arrived on the scene just as they were packing up and Tony had to hand it to Coulson—his agents had taken Tony’s brusque order to take in the scientist without any questions. 

The ride over had been rough. Tony had been shaking and nauseous in the pilot’s seat and Bruce had been working double-time to keep Barnes from bleeding out before his healing factor could come into play. Steve had woken up when they were nearly back to the Tower, apparently only suffering from a mild burn and a concussion. He’d been horrified to see Barnes’s condition and it had only been Bruce snapping at him that had kept him from trying to interfere as Bruce hauled Barnes into his lab the moment they touched down. 

“I promise I’ll keep you updated, Steve,” Bruce had said, covered in Barnes’s blood and wan. “But if I don’t do something, he’ll bleed out before he can heal.” 

Steve had let him go without another protest at that, but he hadn’t moved from the living room since then. Tony had considered leaving him there and going back to the work he’d abandoned when they’d been called out. He could deal with the clean-up after their fight even though it seemed like new SHIELD had mostly taken care of it from the news Tony was getting fed in his ear by JARVIS. 

There was also some leaked cell phone footage of Barnes’s fall and Tony and Bruce trying to save his life flooding social media, and more than one news outlet was commending the newest Avengers recruit for his quick, heroic action. It made Tony sick to hear it and that, more than anything, kept him from going and dealing with the dozens of other things he needed to be doing right then. Instead, he sat with Steve on the couch and they stared at the wall in silence for nearly an hour.

“You said…”

Tony straightened. Steve wasn’t looking at him. He stared straight ahead at the wall in front of him, big hands folded in his lap. When he didn’t speak again for a long time, Tony’s patience, never very long to begin with, snapped.

“I said _what_?”

Steve’s shoulders went up. “You said he’s been getting hurt.”

Tony’s eyebrows went up. After getting stonewalled for the week, he’d honestly expected Steve to never speak of it again. He opened his mouth and closed it again. Forced himself to look at Steve’s pale face. James Barnes wasn’t just a teammate to him—he was Steve’s family. How would Tony feel if Rhodey was in critical condition, if someone had tried to tell him that Rhodey was running on some kind of insane self-destructive protection mission? 

_Empathy, Tony,_ Pepper had told him more than once. _I know you have it, but sometimes you just don’t slow down enough to remember that you do._

“He’s not _getting_ hurt,” Tony said finally. “He’s hurting himself.”

Steve shook his head. “I don’t… I don’t understand. Why he would do that.”

He sounded forlorn, a little boy lost. A man out of time and the only person who was out of time with him wasn’t someone he could understand anymore. Damn it.

“Cap…” Tony shook his head. “Steve. Listen, I know mental health wasn’t something people really cared about back in the golden days, but your buddy’s been through hell.”

“But he’s not—”

“Going through hell doesn’t just _go away_ when you’re not in hell anymore,” Tony said. “The marks you get from that stay. And sometimes you do very stupid and very scary things to deal with them staying.”

Steve turned. His eyes were big and bright in his face. Tony was relieved that he wasn’t crying, but it looked like it was only a matter of time. Tony did not want to be the guy who made Captain America cry. 

To his surprise, Steve’s mouth twitched. “You look like you’d rather by electrocuting yourself,” he said wryly.

Tony shrugged. “Feelings,” he said emphatically. “Talking about them gives me hives, ask anyone. Ask Pepper. Very rare medical condition, I don’t normally talk about it because I am truly a silent sufferer but—”

Steve smiled. Wonder of wonders. 

“What do we do, Tony?” he asked.

“I am very much not saying this to make you start shouting at me,” Tony said. “But why are you asking _me_?”

Steve looked back down at his hands. He hummed a few tuneless bars of _The Star-Spangled Man_.

“The man with a plan,” he said with a humorless laugh. “I feel like I haven’t had a plan in a long time. He’s my best friend, but I don’t even know where to start.” He looked at Tony again and there was something shrewder in his eyes than Tony had ever seen before. “But _you_. You know what to do, don’t you?”

Tony shrugged. “We’re not exactly wearing the same hat, but they’re the same shape. Except mine is designer because I have standards and Barnes probably has something he got at a garage sale.”

Steve’s eyebrows furrowed. “Huh?”

“I think I know what to do. That’s what I mean, Cap.”

Steve’s face smoothed out. He was so utterly relieved that it was almost difficult to look at him. Tony’s stomach squirmed at the thought of crushing that hope, disappointing that faith. He really was fucked here, wasn’t he?

“What can I do? Where do we start?”

Tony leaned back in his chair. His mind running quickly, offering and discarding ideas at a mile a minute. “I think… We need to start with a _very_ stern talking to.”

* * *

Barnes didn’t wake up for two days. By that time, Tony had come up with a game plan. 

He was in the middle of a conference call when he got the discrete message from JARVIS. Tony made his excuses immediately. He was out in the air when he got a call from Pepper and spent the flight reassuring her that he hadn’t ducked out of the shareholders meeting for no reason. When he landed back at the Tower, he made his way directly to Bruce’s lab.

Bruce was still there, of course. He took one look at Tony and his brow furrowed, all wrinkle-lines.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Starting an experiment,” Tony told him. 

Bruce’s eyebrows went up. “Oh?” he asked in a mild voice. “And has this experiment been approved by an ethics committee?”

Tony rolled his eyes. “Steve’s fine with it,” he said. “Now let me go talk to your patient, green bean. I promise I’ll only hurt his feelings.”

“That’s what I’m afraid of,” Bruce said, but it was dry enough that Tony knew he didn’t really mean it. “All right. But you better know what you’re doing, Tony.”

“Do I ever know what I’m doing?” Tony wondered aloud as he swept past Bruce to the room in the back of his lab that doubled as their medical bay. 

“Oh, Lord,” he heard Bruce mutter. 

Tony grinned but forced his face into something appropriately wrathful as he entered the medical bay. He needed to be strong, he reminded himself. Barnes wasn’t Steve’s level of stubborn, but he wasn’t going to like what Tony was going to tell him. Luckily, Tony had plenty of practice in rolling right over other people. 

“James Buchanon Barnes,” he boomed out as he stomped into the medical bay. “It’s time you and I had a little heart-to-heart! Try out that whole Dr. Phil routine! Manfully express our treasured feelings and emotions!” 

Barnes was paler than usual, but he was sitting up in bed and he didn’t look as crazy as he usually did. In fact, he almost looked a little amused—he’d been eating a cup of some kind of godawful hospital jello that Bruce kept stocked purely to torture them for daring to get injured. To Tony’s surprise, Natasha was perched in the chair by his elbow, dressed down in the strange mish-mash of high fashion and hipster that made up her personal wardrobe. Her eyebrows were high on her forehead as Tony came in.

“ _Treasured feelings and emotions_?” she asked. 

“Shoo,” Tony told her. “Frosty and I need to have a chat.”

Natasha eyed him. As always, Tony felt like she could see every single thought he’d ever had, especially the naughty ones. But she stood without another word. She patted Barnes once on his shoulder and slipped out of the room. Tony settled into her vacated seat and wondered if she really just always knew what was going on or if she just didn’t care to wonder why Tony was visiting Barnes. 

Barnes looked at him. He really did look better, but considering the last time Tony had seen him he’d been bleeding out that wasn’t saying much. 

“No one calls me that,” Barnes said finally.

“Calls you what?”

“James Buchanon.” 

“Bucky just doesn’t have the same force to it.”

“Any reason you’re being forceful?”

Tony rolled his eyes. Barnes didn’t look like much and he was so quiet about it that it was easy to actually believe he was just another muscled, thick-headed jock, but Tony knew more about Barnes than probably anyone outside of Steve and HYDRA—he was far from stupid and surprisingly perceptive. Tony was a little insulted Barnes thought he’d be taken in by that ruse.

“Well, you ate the last cream puff and you know much I love sweets.” He gave Barnes the withering stare he’d learned from Pepper. “Are you serious right now?”

Barnes’ stubborn look was almost uncannily like Steve’s. Tony wondered if Steve had taught it to Barnes or if it was the other way around. The more he saw them together, the clearer it was that they’d grown up together.

“That work doesn’t work on me, Ice King,” he said. “I’ve seen it from your bigger, nicer half and if it didn’t work then it’s definitely not going to work now.”

“Dunno what you’re talking about.”

“You’re about as preternaturally good at playing dumb as good old Cap is, but I grew up sniffing bullshit. You’re not going to pull one over on _me_ , so drop the dumb act. You know why I’m here and why I’m pissed.”

Barnes, at least, was better than Steve about being called out. He folded more quickly and with way less pouting. He tipped his head in acknowledgment of Tony’s point and settled his arms over his chest. 

“Fine,” he said. “But I really _don’t_ know what you’re in such a snit about. Saved your life, didn’t I?”

“See, that’s where we do have a problem, Frosted Flakes,” Tony said. “This delusion you have that I need rescuing was cute the first few times but now it’s mostly just insulting.”

Barnes stared at him. “You weren’t in your suit.”

“If you honestly think I need the suit to be dangerous, I take back everything I said about you just _playing_ dumb.” Tony leaned forward and put a hand on Barnes’ bed. He knew his smile had too many teeth to be comforting, but he wasn’t trying to comfort here. “Why don’t we just be honest here?”

“You aren’t being anything _but_ honest.”

“No one has ever once awarded me about my tact,” Tony agreed. “So here’s honest: stop with the martyr thing. I don’t need to be protected and I don’t want it.”

The little wrinkle between Barnes’s eyes deepened. “I won’t promise that,” he said. “If I hadn’t stepped in you might be dead, Stark.”

Tony wanted to shake him. “And if Bruce hadn’t held your guts together you _would_ be dead,” he snarled. “You nearly _did_ die.”

Barnes flinched, face crumpling. His utter surprise cooled Tony’s temper a little and he took a deep breath, leaning back in the chair.

“I can take care of myself,” he said in a much calmer voice. “Steve says I act like a five-year-old, but the truth is I _am_ a big boy and I’ve been brushing my own teeth and tying my own shoes and defeating my own supervillains for years without any help from a Manchurian Candidate wannabe. So do me a favor and look after yourself a little more often when we’re doing our superhero thing.”

“I’m not—” Barnes shook his head. “You of all people should know I don’t need looking after, Stark.”

Tony gave him a long, thorough once-over. Barnes began to flush and his heart-rate picked up on the machines he was hooked up to. 

“I wouldn’t be so quick to say that,” Tony said. 

“What?” Barnes looked down at himself. “This? This is nothing. It’s already mostly healed.”

“Your guts were outside your body, Barnes. My doctorates aren’t in medicine, but even I know that’s not where they’re supposed to be.”

Barnes’ chin went up, his jaw hardening. “What should I have done instead? Let him hit you?”

Tony leaned forward and flicked Barnes gently on the forehead. Barnes frowned at him.

“I can take it,” he says. “I know I’m not some unkillable super soldier, but I’m pretty tough. He wouldn’t have killed me.”

“No,” Barnes said. “But then it’d be you in this bed. And you’d take longer than three days to get over it.”

Tony let out a frustrated breath. He hadn’t known what to expect when he’d come to talk to Barnes, but this conversation wasn’t making him feel any better and it wasn’t getting them anywhere. Barnes’s face was mutinous and set, his eyes hard. He wasn’t going to listen to anything Tony was saying and it was so— _So_ —

“You’ll kill yourself if you keep doing this,” Tony told him. He curled his hands around the rails on the bed and clenched them until he felt the skin on his knuckles tighten. “One day it’s not going to be just your stomach or your leg or your head. You’ll get hit somewhere where you can’t heal and you’ll be gone.”

Barnes’s mouth puckered. “And?” he asked.

“That would bother most people.”

“I’m not most people.”

They stared at each other. Barnes' heart rate had steadied out. Tony had one last tactic to try but he didn’t want to use it. He steeled himself.

“What do you think Steve will do if you die on him, hm? You think he’s going to be fine if you just disappear again?”

Tony was just a normal human. He was almost entirely self-taught and he didn’t have the reflexes of supersoldiers or spies or gods. He didn’t have time to do more than flinch as Barnes’s arm whipped out and his hand took Tony’s throat. Tony spared a moment to be grateful it was his flesh hand.

Tony waited for his windpipe to be crushed. His heart fluttered madly in his chest. But Barnes didn’t tighten his grip, didn’t even squeeze. His eyes were wide and very blue. Tony took a careful breath.

“It’ll kill him if you die,” he said. “You know that. If you can’t stay out of trouble for your own sake, then—then do it for his.”

“He’ll be fine,” Barnes said. It didn’t sound like he knew what he was saying. “He has you and the team now. He’ll recover.”

Tony carefully put his hand over the one on his throat. Barnes’s skin was overly warm. He was probably still feverish. 

“I know you think that,” he said. “But he won’t. If you die, even if you do it protecting one of us—that’s something he’ll never recover from.” 

Barnes flexed his hand. For a long moment, he just looked at Tony. Tony couldn’t read his face at all. 

“Tony!”

Barnes’ pulled his hand back immediately. Bruce hurried to Tony’s side, his brows low and his face thunderous. He gave Barnes a hard stare as he reached for Tony’s throat.

Tony allowed him to check it. “I’m fine, my sweet matcha latte. Barnes and I were just having a little discussion. A heart-to-heart. You know.”

“I know I’ve never been a real sociable guy, but from what I remember you’re not supposed to choke people you’re ‘discussing’ things with.” Bruce hummed under his breath and pulled away. “No damage. And now that I’ve established that, you can tell me what the _hell_ —”

“Now, now, Bruce,” Tony said. “No harm, no foul. You know I’m too sweet-tempered to ever hold a grudge.”

“Tony, you—”

“Get out.”

Both of them turned, but Barnes wasn’t looking at them. His eyes were fixed on the opposite wall. Tony would have said something else, but Barnes was pale and so tense it almost looked uncomfortable. His machines were going crazy. 

“All right,” Tony said. “Come on, big guy.”

“ _Tony_ —”

“Bruce. Come on.”

Bruce followed him out. As soon as they were back in the lab proper, he tapped Tony sharply on the back of his head. He wasn’t going green, but he still looked angry. 

“What the _hell_ was that, Tony! Is your experiment trying to figure out how quickly you can get yourself killed?”

“He wasn’t going to kill me,” Tony said. 

“He had his _hand_ on your throat.”

“His _flesh_ hand,” Tony said. “If he wanted to kill me, the metal one would have been easier. Besides, he’s hardly the first person to try and choke me because they found me annoying. Don’t blame him for not being able to put up with my bullshit.”

“Tony…”

“Bruce.” Tony sighed, running a hand through his hair. “He’s not crazy or feral. I provoked him.”

Bruce settled down into a chair with a sigh. “Okay,” he said. “You _can_ be provoking.”

“It’s my best skill.”

“Any reason you decided to provoke an ex-assassin with a mountain of unresolved issues?”

“You’re the team doctor,” Tony said. He kept his voice casual. “You’re the one who has to patch Barnes up after we go out. So what do _you_ think, Bruce?”

Bruce looked him over. He was so mild-mannered and quiet that it was easy for people to forget that he was one of the smartest people on the planet. Tony never forgot that, not once. He waited expectantly, leaning against Bruce’s worktable. 

“You think the injuries he’s getting aren’t just accidents,” Bruce said. “That he’s doing it to himself on purpose.”

“I think that it’s a lot easier to justify getting hurt when you’re doing it for someone else,” Tony said. “And that Barnes has a lot of reasons to want to hurt himself.”

Bruce sighed again. “You’ve talked to Steve about it?”

“He didn’t really want to listen to me at first.”

“I can’t imagine he would’ve, no. It’s not exactly a pleasant thing to learn your best friend might be suicidal.”

Tony flinched and hated himself for doing it. Thankfully, Bruce wasn’t looking directly at him. 

“I assume you have some kind of plan.”

“I have… 12% of a plan,” Tony said.

Steve would have been angry, Tony thought. Natasha would have rolled her eyes and Clint or Sam probably would’ve made a joke. But Bruce, proving yet again that he was Tony’s twin in all but blood, smiled. 

“All right, Tony,” he said. “Tell me what I can do to help.

* * *

“He doesn’t even think it’s a problem, Pepper.”

“Hm.”

“I mean, I know mental health wasn’t exactly the thing back in the 40s, but this kind of oblivious denial is weird, right? Are we sure he’s not secretly a Stark?”

“Tony.”

“I know, I know. But how else can we explain the emotional constipation? Barnes was sitting in his sickbed two days after getting his guts shot out and insisting he had to do it! When I told him I didn’t want him to risk his life saving me anymore, he looked like I killed his puppy.”

In his ear, Pepper was silent for a whole minute. Tony took the screwdriver out of his mouth and frowned down at the bits of gauntlet he was working on. It didn’t really need to be fixed, but he found tinkering helpful to his peace of mind. 

“You have to be patient with him, Tony. He’s a man out of time.” Pepper sighed. “Not to mention he was a prisoner-of-war for longer than some people have been alive. He’s not going to change just because of one talk.”

Tony made a frustrated sound. “I’m not asking him to be _emotionally adjusted_!” he said. “I’m asking him to acknowledge there’s a problem!”

“Yes,” Pepper said with deep amusement, “it _is_ rather frustrating when someone you care about refuses to listen to reason and keeps putting himself in danger, isn’t it?”

“I don’t _care_ about Barnes.”

“Then why are we even talking, Tony? You called _me_ to complain.”

“I—” Tony frowned and tinkered for another long moment as his mind worked furiously, trying to figure out what he wanted to say. Pepper, proving once again how well she knew him, waited patiently on the other line without speaking. “He’s not just hurting himself,” Tony said finally. “He’s—he’s turning himself into this protective wall, Pep. He’ll put himself between the enemy and anyone and he doesn’t care what it does to him in the process. He even _wants_ some bad guy to kill him, because then he can—he can—”

“He can go out as a hero,” Pepper said. 

Tony closed his eyes at the understanding in her voice. He really didn’t deserve her. She knew exactly what Tony was thinking, exactly why Barnes was putting his back up so much. 

“It’s not healthy, what he’s doing,” he said in a rough voice. “I won’t let him use me as an excuse to punish himself.”

“And what are you going to do about it?” Pepper asked. There was no judgement, no recrimination in her voice, just simple curiosity. “He’s a supersoldier, he’s the _Winter Soldier_. How’re you even going to stop him if this is what he really wants to do?”

“Oh, you know me, Pep,” Tony said, his mind already whirring away, “I’ve always got something up my sleeve.”

* * *

The next week, the Avengers got a report of Doombots invading downtown Manhattan. 

Most of the team was back and after their last disastrous mission everyone was on edge. Steve circled Barnes like a mother with a new calf, ready to throw a shield at anything that even looked at him cross-eyed. Even the wonder twins, usually serene and cracking wise in the face of anything, were on high alert. 

They landed the Quinjet quietly near the place they’d gotten reports of the bots. Tony lifted his facemask as everyone prepared to head out and took a deep breath. Time to put his plan into action, he thought.

“I’m staying with the Solider this time.”

Tony’s announcement was met with baffled amusement and hard stares. He threw on an easy smile and ignored the icy stoicism radiating from his newfound partner standing across the jet, pointedly not looking at him.

“What’s all this then?” Clint asked, looking between Tony and Barnes. His voice was light but his eyes were sharp. “Are we doing a buddy system now? I want Nat.”

“You can be your own buddy, Barton,” Natasha called from the cockpit. “You’re used to going it solo, aren’t you?”

Sam whistled. “That’s cold,” he told Clint.

Clint shrugged philosophically. “Russian,” he said. “She’s got ice for blood.”

“There’s no buddy system,” Steve said. His eyes were on Tony, eyebrows raised. “Iron Man, you don’t need to… announce what you’re going to do.”

Tony shrugged as best he could in the suit, keeping his expression as innocent as he could. “Just thought everyone would benefit from knowing my exact location.”

“Okay, _what_ —”

A blast interrupted Clint’s baffled question. 

“No time,” Steve said, falling immediately into work-mode. “Let’s get out there. Richards and the rest are on Doom, so our focus is taking out the bots and keeping them from destroying Manhattan.”

“Must be Wednesday,” Clint muttered.

“This isn’t another proposal, is it?” Sam asked.

Steve grimaced. “I _didn’t_ ask. Let’s go. Comms on from here on out.”

Steve led the charge out. Tony lifted into the air, but not very far—he followed close behind Barnes’ loping form. The ground was littered with bots, more than Tony had seen in a long time, which was going to be a problem. They were tricky enough to deal with individually but hundreds of Doctor Doom copies were just a pain in general. They were going to have their work cut out for them containing them.

Barnes didn’t seem to be paying him any attention, but Tony figured a world-famous assassin probably had eyes in the back of his head so a lack of direct attention didn’t mean Barnes didn’t know exactly where Tony was at all times. Tony stayed in the air and kept a sharp eye out as the team split up, going off to deal with different knots of bots in the surrounding area. 

Barnes stayed near the edge of the action for a long moment, assessing. Tony waited with him, on edge as he heard fighting in the comms in his ear. JARVIS fed him a constant update of information compiled from street cameras and social media reports, but he ignored it. He had a mission. 

Finally, Barnes leaped into action. Tony leaped after him. 

It took Tony a moment to figure out where Barnes was headed. Clint was in a heavy knot of bots, firing at them with increasing desperation. Tony frowned as he took in the fight. Clint’s strength wasn’t close combat like that—at a distance, he would have been able to take out all of those bots without pausing, but with them all on top of him he was floundering. When Tony did a quick headcount, the others were busy with their own fights to step in. Without help, Clint would probably take some hits, but the bots weren’t deadly, just annoying—Clint would be able to take them out given enough time. 

He was going to tell Barnes as much, but Barnes was already barrelling forward into the fray, unloading the gun he kept strapped to his back. Tony scowled after him. 

“Oh no you don’t,” he muttered under his breath.

Tony followed after Barnes and landed in a crouch next to Clint. He was swarmed within seconds and he swore under his breath as he blasted bot after bot off of him, clearing one only to have six more jump on him. Rockets made things easier—Tony had developed a few that were meant to tear through Doombots like paper, though those were so heavy and specialized that he couldn’t carry that many. He was out almost immediately, so he started relying on his shoulder rockets instead.

Clint regained his equilibrium quickly, as always. He was laughing as he stuck an arrow in a bot that caused a minor explosion, taking out the four bots around it too.

“That’s how it’s done!” he said cheerfully over the comms. “You really know the way to a guy’s heart, Tony!”

“Isn’t that supposed to be food?” Sam said. He sounded amused despite his heavy breathing. “Pretty sure it’s through a guy’s stomach, isn’t it?”

“Well, I wouldn’t say no to food too. But the _real_ way to a man’s heart is—” Another explosion. “—some badass weapons.”

“I live to serve, Barton,” Tony said, grinning a little. 

Now that more of the bots had been cleared out, he could get an easier read on Barnes, who was going after them with mindless ferocity. Even as Tony watched, he ripped an arm off of one, clearly not paying any attention to the blood dripping down his shoulder from cutting himself on the metal. Idiot. Why wouldn’t he use the indestructible hand to do that? 

Tony snorted. He knew why and he wasn’t happy about it.

“You got this, Legolas?” he asked. 

“Excuse _you_ , I’m _Haldir_.”

Clint’s version of a yes. Without wasting any more time, Tony launched himself at Barnes and lifted him from under his arms, taking him entirely off of the ground. Barnes twisted in his grip and Tony almost dropped him. He adjusted his grip and managed to secure him at the last moment. Tony scowled.

“Don’t twist around like that, you’ll fall and break your neck and then all my hard work will be for nothing,” he said.

Barnes sounded nearly guttural when he barked out, “Stark, _what_ —”

“Oh, didn’t you say we were needed somewhere else?” Tony asked sweetly. “I could have sworn I’d heard you yelling my name, Barnes.”

“Maybe in your _dreams_ , Stark.”

Tony blinked. Had he actually…?

“Was that a _sex joke_?” Sam said, scandalized and amused in equal measure.

“Guys,” Steve said, sounding weary and a little high-pitched. “Chatter.”

“If you really want me to dream about you, all you’ve got to do is say the word, big guy,” Tony said in his dirtiest purr, delighting in the way Clint and Natasha both made disgusted sounds. “I’d be _happy_ to yell out your name, even.”

“Iron Man!”

“Oh, don’t be so sour, Cap! I’ll dream about you too if you want.”

“ _Stark_ —”

“Sam, too? Damn, I’ll have my hands full—”

“Stark!”

Tony tensed. That wasn’t a tease. He turned a sharp corner, already heading for Sam’s last calibrated location. Barnes had gone tense and poised in his hands, no longer struggling to get free. It only took a minute to reach Sam, but by the time they arrived, he was clearly down. Tony hissed through his teeth.

“There’s too many,” he said. It looked like half of the goddamn horde was surrounding Sam. “Barnes, let’s—”

 _—get some reinforcements,_ was what Tony had been _going_ to say, but Barnes was no longer in his grip. He’d twisted, flexible as any cat, and landed on his feet amongst the Doombots. Without pause, he was tearing his way through them, shooting and smashing and throwing himself at their bulk. Tony’s brain, normally so capable, stuttered at the sheer stupidity of the situation before it caught up with the program long enough for him to dive down. 

He landed in a crouch and came up swinging, blasting bot after bot with all the firepower he could muster. He was still swarmed in seconds—surrounding him were copies of Doom. Tony gritted his teeth. Fuck, he thought. 

“Barnes!” he called as he blasted and blasted. “Barnes! Damn it! _James Buchanon_!”

Barnes wasn’t listening to him. He threw his weight against a heavy bot with a force that made Tony grit his teeth, tackling it to the ground and smashing its head with the butt of his gun. The gun that was probably depleted from their fight with Barton earlier. Damn it, at this rate even Barnes was going to end up tearing himself to pieces—there were too many of them and they were too durable to be taken down easily. 

Barnes let out a rough grunt in Tony’s ear as a bot’s shot managed to hit him. Tony scowled heavily as he made a decision. He was going to be fucked when he did this, but it was a surefire way to make sure all the bots in this area dropped. He’d hoped to use it as a last resort, not in the middle of the goddamn fight, but Barnes… He watched as Barnes took a blow to the head and came up swinging with his teeth set, eyes alight. Damn it.

Tony put in the passcode. JARVIS made him confirm it twice. 

A concentrated blast erupted from the suit, sending out a harsh electromagnetic pulse through the entire area. The Doombots stuttered and then, as a unit, crashed to the ground, fried to pieces. Within seconds, they were surrounded by powered-down robots. Tony let out a single harsh breath, relieved that it had worked so well. He’d never tried that before. 

Barnes was still holding a Doombot he’d shredded nearly to pieces. He was breathing heavily, bleeding from a hit to the head and a hit to his shoulder. He stared at Tony, eyes wild and furious. Tony couldn’t pay him that much attention, though—several systems were blaring, warning him of energy reserves, emergency power procedures, and his own rising heart-rate. Tony winced. He hurriedly keyed through the blaring alarms, set JARVIS to override, and reluctantly shut the suit down, stepping out of it onto the street. 

Being outside in just the undersuit always felt oddly vulnerable. Tony shivered a little and turned back to the armor. He snorted when he saw how dinged up it was—sometimes he wondered if there would ever be a day when he returned to the Tower without a dinged up paint job. Sighing, he sent it back to Stark Tower to await recalibration and a work-up. He really needed to fix that energy channeling problem, hopefully before Doom got it into his head to go after Sue Storm again. 

When he turned back, Barnes was unsettlingly close. Tony blinked up at him.

“I know I said I’d dream about you, but I _do_ have a bubble, snowflake.”

“What the hell are you _doing_? Get back in your suit.”

“Okay one, the suit’s gone. You didn’t notice it taking to the sky? And two, can’t. Fried it up saving your ass, so I guess I’ll be going back to the tower like the rest of you peasants.”

Barnes’s eyes were clear and sharp, almost knife-like. Tony wanted to take a step back so he forced himself to stay where he was. Barnes wasn’t going to intimidate him, even if he _was_ the best assassin the world had ever seen and a Russian ghost story and everything else. 

“I didn’t need you to help me,” Barnes said. “I had it.”

Tony let his eyes linger on the bloody head and arm, the way Barnes couldn’t really stand up entirely straight as he leaned heavily on his right leg. Barnes’ eyes narrowed. 

“Did you?” he asked. “Because from where I was standing, it looked more like you were getting yourself beat up uselessly fighting too many robots.”

Barnes bared his teeth. “I don’t need you to _save_ me, Stark.”

“What, you can save my life but I’m not allowed to save yours? That’s not exactly fair, Frosty.”

“Fair? _You_ told me to stop saving _you_.”

“Not that this isn’t _fascinating_ , but if you guys could stop arguing long enough to get me somewhere with a bed, I’d appreciate it.”

They both turned. Sam was bracing himself as he tried to stand up. Tony hurried to his side, ducking to help brace him and eyeing him critically. Sam’s head was bloody too and his right wing looked like it had been torn almost entirely in half. He was holding his left arm with a heavy frown. 

Tony poked it. Sam flinched back with a scowl. 

“What is it with you and the poking?” he asked crossly. “It’s sprained, not broken. I think.”

“Better get you to Bruce,” Tony said. He deliberately didn’t look back at Barnes. “Come on then, flyboy. We’ll have to take the long way back. You can tell me what the hell you did to my wings _this_ time.”

“ _My_ wings,” Sam muttered. Tony ducked under his right arm, bracing him. “And don’t blame _me_. I’m not the madman with three hundred thousand unkillable robot copies.”

Barnes didn’t look happy, but that didn’t stop him from following them like a vigilant helicopter mom. Tony rolled his eyes but didn’t say a word about it, even as they passed so many downed bots that it was clear their fight was over. Sam kept stride with Tony as they made their way back to central downtown where they’d left the others. 

They made it most of the way without getting into any more trouble. Tony had been right when he’d said the fighting was over—while they’d been duking it out, Cap and the others had finished off most of the bots. They found the rest of the Avengers gathered by the parked Quinjet.

“ _There_ you are,” Steve said, jogging up to them. His cowl was off and his hair was plastered to his skull with sweat, but he didn’t look injured. “Your comms went down! What happened?”

Hm. Tony must have fried them when he disintegrated the rest of the robots. That was another kink he’d need to work out. He started making mental notes as he handed Sam off to Clint and then realized everyone was looking at him, waiting for an actual answer. 

“Tech malfunction,” he said. “No big deal. We done here?”

Steve’s eyebrows furrowed, but he nodded. “No sign of the real Doom, but Reed was in contact about ten minutes ago and he says they’ve got it under control.”

Tony didn’t groan but the side-look Steve gave him meant he probably didn’t hide his distaste that well. Tony couldn’t help it. Reed Richards was the _worst_.

“Well if _Reed’s_ got it under control,” he muttered.

“Still holding a grudge, Tony?” Natasha asked. She was tucking guns away in the secret places in her jumpsuit, eyeing Tony with her usual reserved amusement. “You’ve known him for years, shouldn’t you be over it by now?”

“Me? Hold a grudge?” He fluttered his eyelashes at her. She rolled her eyes but her mouth quirked in Natasha’s version of open amusement. “Why would you say such a thing, sweet Nat?”

She snorted. “No reason,” she said, dry as a desert. “Come on, let’s get out of here. The Fantastic Four is on clean-up duty.”

“Thank God,” Tony muttered as they began to trudge to the Quinjet in a group. “Looking at all these robot corpses depresses me.”

“You don’t seriously have warm and fuzzy feelings for _Doombots_?” Clint asked. 

“It’s not _their_ fault their creator’s a crazy madman with a hard-on for Sue Storm,” Tony said. “Their design is impeccable and their circuitry is beyond advanced. It’s a waste to use them as thugs and I tell Doom that every time we see him.”

Sam shook his head. “There’s something seriously wrong with you, man,” he said. “Next thing you’ll tell me you feel bad for Kingpin’s little minions or something.”

Tony shrugged. “They’re human,” he said. “They get to choose what they do and who they fight for. Robots? Not so much.”

Natasha shot him a look at that and so did Steve, eyebrows going up. Tony just grinned at them, refusing to show any vulnerability. He glanced out of the corner of his eye to confirm his suspicions—Barnes _was_ staring at him, in that creepy way that was more Winter Soldier than man.

Sam, showing his own impressive perception to sore spots, neatly spun away from that subject to ask Clint about a movie for the night. Tony’s shoulders went down a little. Sam and Clint clambered onto the Quinjet first, arguing about the merits of the Terminator movies, and Natasha followed silently, rolling her eyes. Steve paused outside of the jet, eyeing Tony and Barnes.

“I don’t like it when comms go down,” he said. 

“It wasn’t on purpose, Cap,” Tony said. “Won’t happen again.”

Steve didn’t look convinced. He glanced between the two of them, jaw tense.

“Bucky?” he asked finally. “You sure you’re all right?”

Tony was going to look at Barnes too, but his stomach plummeted with a sudden bad feeling as all the hairs on the back of his neck stood up at once. Tony hadn’t survived this long by ignoring his instincts. He whirled on one foot to find a surviving Doombot turning their way, ready to fire on Steve.

In the space of a breath, fueled by adrenaline, Tony registered several things happening in bullet time. Clint, racing out of the jet and yelling for Steve to look out; Steve, bringing up the shield in a hurried arc, intense concentration on his face; the cock of Natasha’s guns; Barnes—

Barnes, already mid-motion to leap between the shot and Steve.

 _Not on my watch,_ Tony thought furiously. He only had the space of a second to consider his options, make a plan and execute it, but they didn’t call him a genius for nothing—he barely needed half that to move. He only had one chance to pull this off and he wasn’t going to fuck it up.

Breath. Engage the emergency gauntlet from his watch. Breath. Reach out and take Barnes’ metal arm with it. Breath. Twist and pull, using Barnes’ surprise to get enough momentum to send him toppling to his knees. Breath. Grip and pull, hard.

“What the _fuck—_ ”

Tony’s arm nearly gave out as Barnes yanked against his grip. His feet slipped forward but he yanked back, using the enhanced strength in the gauntlet to give him enough of an edge that he wasn’t pulled along like a rag doll the moment Barnes moved. He only needed to keep his hold for another second, at most—

As he’d predicted, Steve raised his shield in time to block the bot’s shot. In the next moment, he sent it swinging and tore the bot in half. 

Tony let go of Barnes’s arm as he tried to yank again, ready to let him go now that the immediate danger had passed. Barnes toppled over, unbalanced. He turned burning eyes on Tony. He was on his knees, but he looked almost more dangerous than he ever had towering over people. Tony tensed. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” he hissed through his teeth, more Russian than Tony had ever heard him.

Tony forced himself to smile. He didn’t think it was a very nice smile.

“Stopping you from getting another unnecessary gut wound, ice pop,” he said in his sweetest voice. “Those medical bills, they can really pile up, you know?”

Barnes got to his feet. Tony forced himself not to step back as Barnes towered over him. Why did supersoldiers have to be so damn tall?

“It was about to hit _Steve_ , you—”

“Buck?”

Barnes’s back went tight and straight. His fury smoothed over into the ice mask that Tony had come to think of as his default expression. Tony frowned. Black rage wasn’t really healthy, but it had to be better than pretending to be an emotionless doll. 

Steve came up behind them, securing his shield on his back again. He was smiling, but it dropped as soon as he saw Tony’s face. His eyebrows drew down and he cocked his head. Tony didn’t dare nod when Barnes was still looking at him but he hoped that Steve could read the worry in his face.

Steve clapped Barnes on the shoulder. “Looks like that was the last one,” he said. Deception wasn’t his strong suit, but at least he sounded suitably casual. “We’d better clear out of here.”

Barnes’s flesh hand curled into a hard fist then released. Tony watched him carefully, ready to step in, but Barnes looked at Steve, looked at Tony, then turned on his heel and marched for the Quinjet, utterly ignoring the rest of the team gathered at its door watching. Steve and Tony watched him go. Steve turned to Tony, biting his lip.

“Tony?” Steve asked, unsure.

“Well, we’d better get out of here,” Tony said. He kept his voice deliberately cheerful. “I’d hate to have to see Reeds’ annoying face after everything else we’ve done today.”

“Tony—”

“Steve. _Later_.”

Steve didn’t look convinced, but he didn’t protest as Tony started for the Quinjet.

* * *

The thing most people didn’t realize about Tony was that he wasn’t just stubborn—he was _obstinate_. Once he got an idea in his head, it was almost impossible to get it out again. So despite a rough start, he wasn’t ready to abandon his plan. Not by a long shot.

The next time they were called out—some sort of sea monster along the harbor, with Namor joining them just to ruin Tony’s day that much more—Tony stuck to Barnes. He followed him around, swooped in when Barnes was about to launch himself at some octopus thing gearing for Natasha, and then again when he tried to go after the main sea monster. When they wrapped up, filthy and covered in squid guts and pus, Tony ignored Barnes’s filthy looks and the questioning eyes of their teammates. 

The next time, fighting against some of the Kingpin’s lackies, Tony deflected more bullets than he could count from a rampaging Barnes. He pulled Barnes back from trying to intervene in Clint’s fight and then full-on body tackled him to the ground as he tried to step in for Natasha. 

Then, when they were called in to help Spiderman with his out-of-control nemesis—and how a teenager could even _have_ a nemesis was beyond Tony—Barnes tried to disappear before Tony could follow him. Unluckily for him, Tony had a tracker in his gun. Even more unluckily, Tony found him in time to lift him clean out of the fight to the death he’d been having with the Green Goblin.

Everyone had questions after that one. Tony was lucky he had so much practice at dealing with the media. He knew how to spin a story with the best of them and even though he knew none of their teammates really believed it, they all left it alone. 

But even though Tony kept Barnes from getting into fights, it seemed like the attacks never stopped. First there were the HYDRA cells Cap insisted they clear out, then an attack by the Enchantress that brought Thor blowing back into town for a solid week, then their joint hit with the X-men on Charles Xavier’s ex-boyfriend. There were two weeks of solid fights, almost back to back. 

In every one of them, Tony stuck to Barnes like glue and refused to let him fight. He intervened or pulled Barnes back or, on more than one occasion, lifted him into the air and took him away. 

He knew it was confusing his teammates. He knew that Steve was starting to get anxious about it, that he wanted to talk to Tony but was reluctant to bring it up. He also knew that with every successfully derailed fight, Tony was ramping up Barnes’ anger and anxiety. Every time Tony intervened, Barnes lost that much more control, got that much more furious. Barnes barely looked at him anymore, didn’t even pretend not to lose him the moment they went out in the field together.

Tony knew Steve probably didn’t approve of his methods, but he wanted Barnes angry. His cold indifference to his own pain was part of the problem to begin with—if Tony could just rile him up enough, if he could get him _talking_ , then maybe…

Tony didn’t really know if it would work. All he could do was keep getting in the way and hope that Barnes would lose it enough to actually face what was going on with him. 

* * *

Steve cornered him in the kitchen three weeks in, Sam hovering at his shoulder with a thoughtful frown. Tony sighed into his coffee. 

“Listen—”

“He’s not getting better, he’s getting worse,” Steve said. “He barely even talks to _me_ now, Tony! What the hell are you doing? I thought you said—”

“Steve.” Sam put a gentle hand on Steve’s shoulder and all of Steve’s indignation deflated. Sam looked at Tony steadily. “You sure about this, Tony? Steve’s right, he’s not getting better.”

Tony took a long draught of his coffee. “It wasn’t until I hit rock bottom that I started looking around for help,” he said.

Steve’s brow furrowed. Sam, on the other hand, looked thoughtful. Tony took another sip of his coffee. 

“Bucky’s not you,” Steve said.

“I told you, Cap,” Tony said. “Same hat. He’s a horse who doesn’t want to drink—we can’t just lead him to the water, we’ve got to make him so damn thirsty that he _has_ to drink it.”

Steve frowned at him. “I don’t like seeing him like this,” he said. “Tony, what you’re doing…”

“It will work, Cap,” Tony said, even though his own confidence on that was still in the air. “Besides, it’s working, isn’t it? He hasn’t been hurt since that one back in Manhattan.”

“He hasn’t been,” Steve said reluctantly. “But his mood is…”

“Give me a little bit more time,” Tony said. “He’ll crack eventually.”

“Yeah?” Sam asked. “And what are you going to do then?”

“What I do best,” Tony said with a tip of his coffee cup. “Improvise.”

* * *

After Afghanistan, Tony had refused to see doctors. 

Pepper had told him he needed a doctor. So had Rhodey and Obie, even JARVIS. He’d ignored them all. Doctors had sent jitters skittering up and down his spine, had made his skin tighten until he felt too small for his own bones. For a while, after he got back stateside, even just seeing a hospital had made him shiver. All he had been able to think about was waking up with his chest open or Yinsen reviving him during those harrowing first few weeks when the car battery seemed to give out on him at any moment. 

Obie’s betrayal had changed things. Tony had had his _heart_ taken out of his chest, had nearly suffocated to death, and he had needed to understand more about the way the arc reactor was affecting his body. He’d spent several weeks pussyfooting around the idea of doctors, taking half-hearted looks at the color-coded lists Pepper kept leaving around, then he had picked one at random and marched into their office one afternoon, heart thudding in his ears.

The doctor had been fine. He’d been no-nonsense and clear. He’d shown Tony the scans they’d taken of his chest, outlined the way the initial surgery had cut into his ribs and lungs. The arc reactor, the doctor had said, kept the pieces of the bomb from reaching his heart, but it also reduced his lung capacity and increased his chance for infection and illness. It fucked with his circulation and if left in his chest unchecked it would cause bone problems in old age. 

Tony had made it through the entire meeting then gone home and had what he now recognized as his first panic attack.

Afterward, he’d recovered with the alcohol the doctor had forbidden to him. Then, the next day, he’d gone to another doctor who’d told him pretty much the same thing. Another doctor, who had told it to him again. By the time he made it to the tenth, he had felt desensitized enough to actually listen to their advice on what to _do_ about the problem.

Most of them had told him he needed to have the reactor removed. Tony refused to do that. After a lot of hemming and hawing, they had eventually given him a list of ways to keep his blood circulation high and reduce his chance of infection. On that list was boxing three times a week. 

Tony hadn’t taken a boxing lesson before that, hadn’t even thought about it. Howard probably would have liked him more if he’d been more interested in sports as a kid, but he’d only ever cared about robots and building things. But Happy boxed and if Happy knew how to do it, then Tony could boss him into teaching him how to do it instead of having to try to find some stranger to do it instead.

So Tony boxed now. He continued to box even after Happy started working for Pepper and Tony joined up with the Avengers. He did it three times a week, like clockwork; it was one of the few routines that Tony kept. Which meant it only made sense that it was the time that Barnes knew best to ambush him.

Two days after their latest fight, Tony stepped into the communal gym late in the evening. He always preferred to do his training before his usual night’s work when everyone else in the Tower was elsewhere. The gym was, as expected, largely deserted. Tony wrapped his hands, hauled out a bag, warmed up, and began going through the motions.

He’d been at it for twenty minutes when his back broke out in goosebumps. Tony continued hitting the bag for another five minutes before he stopped with a sharp breath, wiping sweat out of his eyes. He glanced at a patch of shadow in the room that seemed a little more person-shaped than the rest.

“Got something to say, Frosted Flakes?”

Barnes melted out of the shadows. He wasn’t in his gear, but he moved like the Winter Soldier; all hip and leg, light on his feet. No ice in his face this time, though—his brow was heavy, his jaw tight. He looked pissed, but he didn’t speak even as he stood near Tony’s bag and watched him with cold, sharp eyes. 

Tony finished his set and stretched his arms, trying to look casual. He wasn’t unnerved but he was wary. He’d been expecting Barnes to blow up, but he hadn’t been sure how it would happen. This furious silence wasn’t what he’d imagined at all and he wasn’t really sure what to do with it. He didn’t particularly want another hand around his throat. 

Testing the waters, he offered, “Not so chatty today, hm?” 

“No.” Barnes’ voice was rough, deeper than usual. 

Tony eyed him. Barnes was bigger than he was, obviously, and even if no one could approach Thor’s sheer mass, he was at least as muscular as Steve. Tony’d already been going at it for a while and he was out of the suit—Barnes would flatten him in a heartbeat. But… 

Tony had flashes of insight, usually when he was in his workshop. He’d be working on a thorny problem, something that was giving him no end of headaches. Then he’d have a stray thought or the snatch of memory and the answer would unwind in his head as if he’d just been given it by someone else, clear and precise. It drove Bruce nuts, of course, but Tony had come to rely on that intuition. It got him some of his best tech ideas—the arc reactor had been born from it, and Iron Man.

More rarely, Tony got that flash about people. It had convinced him to take on a scrappy Pepper Potts barely out of business school, it had made him think twice about the superhero team Fury kept trying to push on him. It was what had lead to him in the gym, confronting the Winter Soldier. And it was telling him that Barnes was never going to let go enough to talk unless they were fighting.

Well. It wasn’t like Tony hadn’t ended up bruised from training before.

He rolled his shoulders. “How about a spar, big boy?”

Barnes’s anger dropped enough to allow in some surprise. His eyebrows lifted clear to his hairline. 

“борьба?” he asked. 

Did he know he’d just said that in Russian? Tony knew only a little Russian—they’d never been big business partners. His Chinese was better. But he recognized that word. 

“Да,” he agreed cautiously.

From the way Barnes started, he obviously hadn’t realized about his sudden switch. He colored a little and cleared his throat.

“Sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t—Sorry.”

“No problem,” Tony said. “I’ll warn you, my Russian is pretty much limited to swear words and _the weather’s nice, isn’t it?_ so you can’t expect much more from me there. So, fight?”

“You really want to do that?” Barnes eyed him. “Fight me?”

“Just a friendly spar, Barnes. What harm could it do?” Tony smiled at him. “Besides, don’t you want to punch me after the last month?”

Barnes’s jaw set. His hesitation turned into something firey. He stepped past Tony into the wooden boxing ring Tony had installed the moment he’d moved into the Tower for good. Tony followed him, taking the time to stretch out his sore muscles a little more. It wouldn’t do him much good against a fresh fighter as good as Barnes, but at least it would make it less painful for him tomorrow.

“You should get a suit,” Barnes told him.

“I don’t do friendly spars in the suit,” Tony said. “Besides, what’s the worse you can do to me? I can take a few love taps.”

Barnes’ jaw tightened even further. “To three hits, then.”

“Sure,” Tony said. “Three hits or whoever yields first.”

Barnes nodded. He fell easily into position, hands up and shoulders relaxed. Tony eyed him. He would need to be quick and flexible to land anything and, unfortunately for Tony, Barnes’ size didn’t actually slow him down at all. The only real way to get an advantage was something Tony happened to excel at; making an obnoxious distraction of himself.

“So, is there some reason you’re trying to kill yourself?” he asked and ducked in to take a swipe at Barnes’s stomach.

Barnes leaped back in time, but Tony immediately knew it should have been faster. Tony ducked under a blow to his head and came up on the other side of the ring. Barnes scowled at him.

“‘m not trying to _kill_ myself,” he said sharply. “Dunno why you keep saying that.”

“Oh, you _don’t_ know, huh?” Tony asked. “Then all those hits you’ve been taking… They’re just accidents, I guess?”

“We’re the good guys,” Barnes said, eyes narrowing. “The hits come with the job.”

That was unhappily similar to how Steve had talked about it. Tony rolled his shoulders and ducked another hit from Barnes. 

“You think I don’t know about the hits that come with the job?” he asked. “I fight bad guys in a _tin can_ , Barnes. I’m not a supersoldier or a god, I’m just a guy. I know about the hits. What you’re doing, though, it’s not just… the normal course of the crazy lives we lead.”

Barnes came for him again. Tony was getting slower, he knew he was, but Barnes wasn’t focused either. His mouth was a harsh slash and his eyes were hard. Tony tried to tap his stomach again, but he was blocked with a blow against his arm that made it ring with pain. 

“I’m _not_ doing anything,” Barnes said. “You’re the one who’s, who’s—”

“Who’s _what_?”

Duck, duck, punch. Tony’s lungs were burning but he refused to give into it. Barnes’s face was alive, alight with feeling. Tony hadn’t seen him so animated outside of a newsreel from the 40s. 

“ _Doing_ things,” Barnes snapped. “You’re like a fuckin’ parasite. Can’t get you _off_ of me when we go out. Stop it.

Tony tried to take him out at the knees. “I won’t,” he said. 

Barnes reached for Tony’s arm to throw him, but Tony managed to escape his grip. Barnes followed him, intent. They dodged blows for several excruciatingly long moments before Barnes managed to tap Tony’s arm again. While he had Tony in his grip, he glared directly into his eyes.

“You have to, Stark. What you’re doing, it’s not—It’s keeping me from—You _have to_ , Stark!”

Tony’s heart thudded against his ribs. “What am I keeping you from doing, Barnes?” 

Barnes stared at him. “You _know—_ ”

“No, I don’t. All I’ve been doing is keeping a certain teammate of mine out of trouble when we fight bad guys. At least, that’s what _I_ thought I was doing.” Tony stared directly into his eyes, daring him. “What do you think I’ve been doing?”

Barnes licked his lips. “You’re getting in the way,” he said. 

“The way of what? You hurting yourself?”

“I’m _not—_ ”

Tony broke his hold. Before Barnes could move, he gave him a glancing blow to the collarbone he’d seen Barnes break two days ago and ignored his own pang of guilt as Barnes cried out. Barnes came up swinging, but he was winded now and Tony used that to his advantage. 

“87%,” Tony said as they traded blows, ruthless because he had to be. “That’s your injury rate, Barnes. You come home injured so often that I don’t think you’ve been _uninjured_ since you joined the Avengers. They don’t have time to fully heal before we’re out again, yeah?”

“That’s—” Barnes swiped for him and Tony dodged it. “You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“You pick fights,” Tony said. “You find the biggest, nastiest son-of-a-bitch out there and you go after it like it’s your god-damned mission. You protect your teammates even when they can protect themselves. You know why, Barnes?”

Tony brought his arm down for Barnes’s shoulder, but Barnes caught it before it could land. For a long moment, they were locked in place. Tony was no match for the Winter Soldier’s strength, especially against his metal arm, but he refused to be pushed back. He fixed his eyes on Barnes’. 

“I’m an Avenger,” Barnes said. His voice was very cold now. Wintery. “I’m… Everything I’m doing, I do it to _help_ people.”

He tried to say it with conviction, with strength, but Tony could hear the cracks in it. He’d said the same thing to himself more than once—that every hit he took, every injury he had, it was worth it because he was helping other people. Sometimes he’d really believed it and other times he’d known it for what it was—a good excuse to be the punching bag he thought he deserved to be.

“You help people,” Tony agreed. “Everyone but yourself, right?” God, it really was like looking in the mirror. Tony’s stomach churned but he forced it down. He couldn’t afford to falter now. “But that’s not why and we both know it.”

“What _do_ you know about it?” Barnes snarled. 

“What do I _know_ about it?” Tony asked in disbelief. He broke their long hold at last, spinning out of range of Barnes’s reflexive blow. “I know you were basically a human popsicle for a while there, but they let out to play every now and again, didn’t they? You never heard about me when you were topside?”

“Tony Stark,” Barnes said. He recited it like he was reading it from a textbook. “You were a tech CEO, a playboy, a genius. Howard’s son. You were always on tabloid covers.”

“I wasn’t just that,” Tony told him. God, he’d let this fight go on for too long. His lungs were burning. “You’re not the only one with a fancy title, ice pop. For most of my life, I was the Merchant of Death.”

“So?”

“So?” Tony huffed out a laugh, so out of breath and sore that it was more of a sigh than anything else. “ _So_ , you think you’re the only one with blood on his hands? Line up the guys you killed and I bet you all my enormous piles of cash my body count is higher. You murdered in the hundreds, fine—I’ve murdered in the thousands. There’s red in my ledger, Ice King, and I’ll never wipe it out.”

Barnes stared at him, distracted for just a moment from their fight. “That’s—”

Tony shook his head. “I’m not inviting you to my pity party, Barnes. I’m telling you that if you think you’re the only one with guilt problems on this team, you really are stupider than you look. You think I don’t know about hating yourself so much you’d let anything happen to you as long as it keeps other people safe?”

Barnes’ fist clenched and came for Tony’s face. Tony ducked and weaved to the opposite corner of the ring. Barnes followed. 

“I don’t _hate_ myself,” he said. “I don’t. Maybe I’m not as careful as I should be, but—”

“You hate yourself, Barnes,” Tony said. They were trading a flurry of blows now, moving back and forth in the ring. Tony couldn’t feel his arms anymore. “No one lets themselves get hurt that badly who doesn’t. You think you’re a hopeless cause, that you’re a worthless man who’s been given a second chance by people kinder and better than you, and all you can do is make yourself worthy of it in any way you can. But you’re not worthy and knowing that is tearing you apart.” 

Tony hit the ropes as he took a hard blow to his shoulder. Barnes crowded against him, breathing hard. His eyes were wide and a little feral, too much of the whites showing. Tony struggled against his bigger weight.

“That’s _not_ true.”

Tony snarled, shoving hard at Barnes until he fell back. “Isn’t it? You were a weapon for Nazis for seventy years.” Duck, duck, punch. “You’ve murdered people. And now you’re an Avenger.” Jab, jab, swipe. “You want to do good, but at every step, you’re haunted by all of the horrible things you’ve done. And all you want to do is drown your sorrows, maybe find some peace in death, but if you do that you’re letting down the kinder, better people who loved you enough to give you a second chance.” 

Barnes tried for another blow. Tony ducked, came up with an uppercut that managed to land on Barnes’s side. He reeled back. 

“Shut _up_ , that’s not—”

Barnes was faltering, weakening. He should have wiped the floor with Tony a long time ago, but his blows were getting weaker and weaker, less focused and dangerous. Tony pressed his advantage. He forced himself into Barnes’ space. 

“So you go out and you fight,” he hissed into Barnes’ face, “and you hate yourself because you’re still a monster and you’ve always been a monster and you’ll never be able to stop being a monster no matter how many kids you save or kittens you rescue from trees.”

“Stark—” Barnes’ face was pale, his eyes huge. 

Tony couldn’t stop. Not now. “So you fight and you fight and you feel better when you do it,” he said, jabbing an accusing finger into Barnes’ throat. “You can release some of the pain that way. If you hurt yourself with the bruises and the cuts and the shots, isn’t that what you _deserve_? You’re doing it to save other people, to keep them safe—don’t you deserve to be hurt so much more than those good, kind people?” He jabbed again, harder. “Don’t you _deserve_ to die?”

“ _Of course I deserve to die_!”

Tony froze. Barnes froze. 

For a long, tense moment all they could do was stare at each other. Tony’s breath came in short, harsh pants. He couldn’t feel his arms anymore and his knees were threatening to give out. Barnes’s face was utterly white, his eyes huge and suddenly young. Tony had never seen him look vulnerable before. Slowly, he lowered the finger he’d had in Barnes’ face. He tried to take a step back, give Barnes some space, but his leg buckled and he went down with a cry. 

When he looked up, Barnes was gone. 

Fuck.

* * *

Tony had fully expected Steve to come storming in accusing him of hurting Barnes. He’d been braced for it for three days, but he’d only gotten unnerving radio silence on the frozen supersoldier front. He’d bantered with Clint, played video games with Sam, worked on some experiments with Bruce, and shared a late-night snack with Natasha, but he hadn’t gotten a whiff of their men out of time since his confrontation with Barnes in the gym.

He’d taken it too far. He knew that now. Barnes hadn’t been ready to face those truths about himself—his denial, like Tony’s, was one of the biggest blocks to him actually being able to deal with his trauma. Tony had taken years to acknowledge that he even had a problem. He couldn’t expect Barnes to do it in a few weeks. In his rush to get Barnes to stop hurting himself, Tony had deliberately refused to acknowledge that simple truth. 

Tony’s therapist had said as much when Tony had called him after the confrontation, awash with panic and fighting off an attack. He’d calmed Tony down, listened to his story, and told him that since Tony didn’t have any kind of doctorate in psychology he probably shouldn’t try acting like a therapist to one of his coworkers. 

“I know you feel responsible for him.” Dr. Tanner had a low, soothing voice and Tony had clung to it in the aftermath of the near panic attack, shuddery and uncertain. “But we’ve discussed this before, Dr. Stark. Despite your feelings, not everyone _is_ your responsibility and it is not a personal failure if you do not take responsibility for them.”

“I know that. I _know_ that.”

“Dr. Stark. You know that, but your actions show that you’re still struggling with it. Why would you not arrange for someone more qualified to speak with Sergeant Barnes? Or help his friend, the Captain, understand him? From what I understand, the two of you aren’t even close.”

Tony had been silent for a long time. He’d had to think about it. “He’s hurting himself because he hates himself,” he had forced out finally. “He’s doing it by protecting other people. I couldn’t… It’s too much like…”

“Seeing your own coping methods in others is often distressing,” Dr. Tanner had said in his calm, calm voice. “Especially when those coping methods are destructive. But, Dr. Stark… That still does not make him your responsibility. It sounds like the Sergeant does need help, but you have to remain objective or you won’t be able to provide it to him.”

It was good advice, sound advice. Tony had decided to follow it. He’d stop getting in Barnes’s way when they went out, he’d talk to Steve about contacting a therapist and advise him on the best way to deal with Barnes’ problem and then Tony would… He’d step back. He’d stop trying to get Barnes to see his own problem or fix it. It was the smart thing to do, the kind thing to do. The _objective_ thing to do. Tony had been kidding everyone when he’d pretended he had all the answers. If anything, this whole mess had proved that he definitely _didn’t_ and it was better for everyone involved that he actually realized that and stopped butting in where he was clearly not wanted or needed.

So Tony was adamantly _not_ thinking about supersoldiers as he worked on repairing a shredded boot in his workshop. He had his music on in the background and he kept his focus on soldering and repairing. It was drudge work, mostly something to keep his hands busy. 

“Sir.” JARVIS sounded a little confused. “Sergeant Barnes is requesting access.”

Tony nearly dropped his soldering iron. He looked up to find Barnes standing outside of the workshop doors, looking in. He was wearing soft pants and a long-sleeved shirt, barefoot, his hair down. As Tony watched, he shifted from foot to foot. 

“Let him in,” Tony said, utterly bemused.

Barnes didn’t react with surprise as the door silently opened. Tony stood as he walked in. Barnes had been in the workshop before, of course, when Tony and Princess Shuri had worked on getting him a new arm and fixing his triggers, but never by himself and never for long. Steve had always been nearby, radiating worry and hovering. Barnes would come for the mandatory check-ups and work-ups, of course, but he never stayed long.

Tony watched as Barnes looked around. Most of the screens were dim since Tony wasn’t working on many projects at the moment and the light messed with his eyes if he kept it on for too long. Barnes reached out for the floating projection of the boot Tony was fixing, flicking it until it zoomed in on the exact formulas for the boot’s power calibrations. 

Tony had no idea what to do here. Barnes didn’t look like he was going to go on a rampage, but the last time they’d spoken they’d been fighting and it hadn’t ended well. Tony didn’t _think_ Barnes would attack him, but—

“I don’t think I deserve to die.”

Tony startled. He knocked over some of the nuts on the table. He bent to pick them up, trying to gather his thoughts, but Barnes knelt with him. Tony leaned back on his heels and watched as Barnes picked up a few of the nuts. He offered them to Tony. 

“Okay,” Tony said as Barnes’s fingers brushed his palm. “Then why’d you say it?”

Barnes didn’t look at him. He shrugged. 

“I was angry,” he said. 

Tony knew a thing or two about saying things when you were angry, but he severely doubted that was the actual truth. He didn’t think Barnes _had_ been angry. For one thing, when he’d shouted it, it hadn’t been furious, it had been desperate. But he doubted Barnes would accept that and the last thing they needed was another fight. He rose to his feet, dumping the nuts in a haphazard pile on the table. Barnes rose with him, still looking at the ground. 

“Okay then,” Tony said. “Hey, want to see something cool?”

Barnes finally looked at him. He had dark circles under his eyes that should have been healed by the serum. Tony wondered if he’d slept at all since their fight, but he didn’t ask. Instead, he turned back to the dimmed screens and opened one of his dormant files. The blue glow filled the entire workshop. 

“I’ve been working on some improvements to the armor,” he said, looking only at the schematics and not at Barnes. The glowing replica of the newest armor appeared in pieces on the work table; Tony’s obsession for the last several weeks. “I’m thinking of incorporating nanotech into the design…”

Tony kept his eyes off of Barnes as he explained about the suit. He talked about its specifications, the challenges he’d found in making a suit run on nanotech, the breakthroughs and failures and triumphs he’d had. He kept his face open and relaxed. It was easy to do when he was talking about something he enjoyed. By the time Barnes spoke again, Tony had actually almost forgotten that he was in the room.

“You said…”

Tony paused. Barnes’s voice had been very soft, a near whisper. Tony almost hadn’t heard him.

“Yes?”

When Tony looked, Barnes was looking at his feet. His long hair fell over his eyes, hiding his expression from view. 

“Never mind.”

Tony wanted to pursue it, but the last time he’d been ruthless with Barnes it hadn’t ended well for either of them. _Objective,_ he reminded himself. _Not your problem,_ said Dr. Tanner’s voice, so reasonable that Tony couldn’t ignore it. So he shrugged and turned back to the suit. He was about to start explaining the new rockets he was planning to put in when Barnes spoke again.

“You said you killed people.”

Tony’s arms broke out in goosebumps. He cleared his throat several times and kept his eyes fixed on the glowing armor schematic. If he looked at Barnes when he said this, he would probably collapse.

“I made weapons for most of my adult life,” he said. “The weapons I made were used in wars and were sold to terrorists. They killed a lot of people.”

God. It had taken him years of therapy to be able to say that out loud as evenly as he just did. Tony made a face at the schematic, annoyed by his own hesitance. 

“But _you_ didn’t kill them,” Barnes said. 

“Didn’t I?” Tony shook his head, shoulders coming up to his ears. “I made the weapons. I sold them. Maybe I didn’t pull the trigger, but is it really that different when I put the gun in the hands of the guy who did?”

“Yes,” Barnes said, quiet but adamant.

Tony finally looked at him. “You weren’t the guy pulling the trigger, Barnes,” he said. “You were the gun.”

Barnes’s mouth tightened. He really didn’t look well, Tony thought. He needed to get more sleep. 

“I remember them,” Barnes said. “All of them. And before… I was a sniper in the Army. One of the best. I was a killer before HYDRA.”

“Well, I’m a killer too, then,” Tony told him. “So’s Natasha and Clint and Sam. Hell, even Steve’s got blood on his hands. Bruce leveled a _city_ once. Fury ordered more than one agent to die. Coulson will too, probably.” 

“So I’m surrounded by murderers,” Barnes said, wry. “That makes it okay?”

“No. But you’re not some kind of monster, Barnes.”

Barnes shivered. “You don’t know what I did for them, Stark.”

“What they _made_ you do,” Tony reminded him. “There’s a difference.”

“Is there?” Barnes shook his head, looking down at his hands with a troubled cast to his face. “People still died. I still killed them. And not just by giving someone else a gun, I _killed_ them. With my own two hands. Some of them… some of them I strangled.” Barnes swallowed hard. “I _am_ a monster.”

“So, what, all those injuries you get, they’re what you deserve?”

Barnes lifted a shoulder. “If it means saving someone else,” he said.

Tony scoffed. “Noble. Real noble.”

Barnes’s eyes narrowed. “I’m _helping_ ,” he said. “It’s the only thing I can do to—to make up for it. Any of it.”

“Nothing will _make up_ for it, Barnes,” Tony said.

Barnes stared at him. “What?”

“Blood is a stain. It’s not something you can wipe out or get rid of. You can’t _make up_ for killing people, no matter how many people you save. There’s no erasing it.”

“Then _what—_ ”

“All you can do,” Tony continued as if Barnes hadn’t spoken, “is move forward and do better than you did in the past. That’s all any of us can do.”

Barnes stood up abruptly. “I’m going,” he said.

He marched out. Tony sagged against the table wearily. So much for keeping his objective distance, he thought wryly. Dr. Tanner was going to be pissed with him.

* * *

“So what you’re telling me,” Rhodey said over the phone, “is that you mother henned yourself into taking care of the Winter Soldier’s suicidal tendencies and now you’ve realized that you’re actually like a pot trying to help a kettle stop being black?” 

“Honeybear,” Tony complained. “Don’t be like that. I came to you for _advice_.”

“Advice for how to deal with an idiot who can’t take care of his own safety?”

“Well,” Tony said, shrugging and glad that he’d decided to do a voice-only phone call. “You _are_ the reigning expert.”

Rhodey was quiet for a long time. When he spoke again, there was only quiet affection in his voice. Tony had never been able to get used to that, not really. He had to close his eyes and brace himself for it. 

“If you really want to help him, you just got to be there for him, Tones. Talk to him. Let him talk. Treat him like he’s a person and not a creepy zombie assassin.”

“He’s not creepy, platypus.”

“He is a little bit,” Rhodey said without shame. “That’s fine, you’re all a little creepy.”

Tony mock gasped. “I am your _husband_ ,” he said.

“For the last _goddamn time_ , we got that stupid Vegas thing annulled _ten years ago_! When will you let it go!”

“Never,” Tony admitted and laughed as Rhodey cursed him out. He waited until Rhodey had run out of steam to add, “The doc said I was taking on too much, helping Barnes.”

“He’s right,” Rhodey said. “But you always take on too much—I’ve given up trying to get you to stop.”

Tony let out a long breath. “He needs help, Rhodey.”

“And you can help him,” Rhodey said. His unshakeable faith in Tony really was something else. “Tones, there’s no one else in that house I’d trust with him more. You got this, okay?”

“You sap,” Tony said. Even though he was teasing, his voice was a little watery. “You’re turning mushy, old man.”

Rhodey made a sound of disgust in his ear. Tony beamed.

“See if I ever support _you_ again, you ungrateful little asshole,” Rhodey grumbled. “This is why we got divorced.”

“I thought we got divorced because I drive too fast?”

“That too.”

“You really are just stomping on my heart over here, applejack.”

* * *

Tony wasn’t sure what he expected to happen next, but it wasn’t Barnes coming back to the workshop two nights later. Tony was in the middle of an arrow upgrade for Clint, actually working this time instead of pretending to, but he allowed JARVIS to open the door for Barnes. Barnes hesitated in the doorway, eyebrows going up.

“You look busy,” he said.

Tony looked up. He was pretty sure his hair was still smoking from when the arrow had exploded earlier and he might have burnt off part of his eyebrow. He shrugged.

“Exploding arrows,” he said. “I had an idea for it this morning and I’ve been trying to get it right ever since.”

“It’s nearly midnight.”

“Already? Damn. I have a board meeting tomorrow morning, Pepper will kill me if I miss it.”

Barnes sat down in the chair near Tony’s table, only to come back to his feet as a sharp beep sounded through the room. Dum-E waved happily at him from the corner Tony had banished him to. He had the dunce cone on his head for knocking over Tony’s entire workstation earlier that afternoon and then trying to feed him a smoothie with motor oil in it.

“Don’t wave at him, you are in a time out,” Tony told him. 

Dum-E drooped. Even the hat looked sad. Tony rolled his eyes. When he turned back, Barnes was staring at him. Tony blinked back at him, surprised.

“What?” he asked.

“That’s—is that a robot?”

Tony tensed. 

His bots stayed in the workshop. They’d never gone anywhere else in the Tower and Tony preferred it that way. JARVIS… JARVIS was advanced enough to protect himself. He knew not to reveal the extent of his emotional processing skills, how much he could comprehend and learn, especially to outsiders. But the bots weren’t that capable. All of them were failures, in their own ways, but Tony hardly cared about that. What he didn’t want was people who would gawk and stare and poke at them. He didn’t trust anyone to _not_ do that, even his own teammates, which is why every time Steve and Barnes had come to the workshop in the past, the bots had remained firmly on their chargers, powered down. 

It unnerved Tony that he’d forgotten that hard rule when it came to Barnes. He cleared his throat, shifting from foot to foot uneasily. Well, he thought. Cat’s out of the bag now anyway.

“Yes,” Tony said. “That’s Dum-E. He’s in a time out for being a bad boy.”

A mournful beep came from behind him. Tony made a face, some of his tension dropping.

To his surprise, Barnes smiled. It was a small one, hardly on par from the Barnes from before, but it transformed his entire face. Tony blinked, disconcerted by how suddenly good-looking Barnes was. It was easy to forget that he was just as attractive as Steve when he wasn’t brooding and murderous all over the place. 

“You build robots,” Barnes said. “I mean, I knew about the AI and stuff but—” He waved a hand. “Can it speak?”

“He,” Tony corrected. He hesitated. “Dum-E, you can come out of time out. A temporary reprieve, whatever. Come say hello.”

Dum-E came with a happy chirp. Little drama queen had probably been faking that sadness the whole time. Tony pointed at Barnes.

“James Barnes, this is Dum-E,” he said. “He has touch receptors along this strip here. You can touch him and he’ll feel it. Dum-E, make a good impression, don’t embarrass me. Say hello.”

Dum-E chirped. He held out his arm for touches. Tony watched, more than a little anxious, as Barnes reached out and brushed his fingers against the touch receptor strip Tony had put in years ago. Dum-E chirped again and bumped his arm more insistently against Barnes’s hand. Barnes laughed—actually laughed!—and gave him a firmer pat.

“He understands,” Barnes said. He looked at Tony. “He’s—he can _understand_. How?”

“He’s like JARVIS,” Tony explained. “Much more rudimentary, of course, but I was barely nineteen when I made him, so what can you do? But he has a similar set of core code and he’s built to learn.”

Barnes shook his head in amazement. Dum-E bumped against his hand again and Barnes patted him. Tony watched them for a long moment, crossing his arms over his chest. 

“Did you want to talk about something, Barnes?” he asked.

Barnes didn’t look at him. Didn’t speak for a long time. Tony had to bite his tongue not to say anything. Tony didn’t do patience, but he knew all about having to gather the courage to say something you really didn’t want to say. When Barnes finally did start talking, he didn’t look away from Dum-E.

“I had a dream. Mission number 89. A foreign diplomat who was making waves, speaking out against Russia. He was the only target, but when the Soldier—” Barnes closed his eyes. “When _I_ took him out, his wife came into the room. So I killed her too and then… and then his daughter came in and—”

Tony bit the inside of his cheek so hard it filled his mouth with blood. The tang of it was unpleasant on his tongue but he refused to speak, could hardly breathe. Not if it would interrupt Barnes.

“I dream of them,” Barnes said heavily. “The people I killed. And I can’t figure out why they died and I’m still here. I shouldn’t be.” H finally looked at Tony, his eyes hard. “That’s why… That’s why I said that, in the gym. I’m a monster. The injuries, the pain… I _do_ deserve them. For the things I’ve done, I deserve worse.”

Dr. Tanner, as usual, was right. Tony should have gotten a therapist for this, should have gone to someone who was actually equipped to handle it. Because he couldn’t say anything, caught in his own indecision. So much for having a plan—Tony had no idea what to do. More than that, he was terrified of saying the wrong thing and tipping Barnes back into silence, back into denial. 

“And…” Barnes shook his head. “I’ve been alive for so long. Steve, he was sleeping, but I wasn’t for most of it. Seventy years.” He finally looked at Tony. His pale eyes were clear but empty. “I’m tired. Some days I’m so tired I don’t really know how to get out of bed.”

That sounded familiar enough that Tony managed to get ahold of himself _. Same hat,_ he reminded himself. Barnes’ trauma was different than Tony’s, but that self-loathing and guilt complex was the same. Tony could help him. Rhodey had said so, hadn’t he?

“You’ve been through a lot, Barnes,” Tony said as firmly as he could, making sure to look Barnes directly in the eyes. “More than most people. You got dealt one of the crappier hands life has ever given. Being upset about that, that’s—normal. But if you keep doing this to yourself, one day you _will_ end up dead.”

“Would that be so bad?” Barnes murmured.

Tony forced himself not to react to that as he wanted to. Shouting wasn’t going to help, he knew that from experience. Telling Barnes about the wonders of life wasn’t going to do anything, either. Instead, he pretended to seriously consider the question.

“Well,” he said. “I don’t know what Sam would do if he couldn’t rag on you every chance he gets. And Clint needs someone around to keep him from getting cocky about his aim. Natasha needs a sparring partner. Bruce says you make good tea. And Dum-E here clearly would miss how good you are at petting.”

Barnes had gone still as Tony talked. When he said that, Barnes looked down at Dum-E. Dum-E, proving yet again that he wasn’t nearly as stupid as Tony thought he was, chirped inquisitively and pushed his arm against Barnes’s hand. Barnes patted him.

“And you?” he asked. 

“Me?” Tony shrugged. “Be a pain to lose you after all the work I put into your arm,” he said mildly. “Not to mention getting the triggers out. You know what my time’s worth, Barnes? That’s a lot of expensive, expensive hours poured into you. You don’t want to waste that, do you?”

Barnes stared at him. “You think that’s why I should stay alive?” he asked. “To be a sparring partner and a punching bag and a rival? To give a robot some nice pats?”

Tony shrugged, shoving his hands into his pockets. He looked over Barnes’ shoulder, slowly gathering himself for what he wanted to say. He’d never told anyone this outside of therapy, but it wasn’t like he could expect Barnes to show Tony his demons without exposing some of his own in return. Tony believed in fairness. He swallowed and forced himself to speak.

“After Afghanistan, there was a long time where I was only staying alive because I knew that if I died, Pepper would cry,” Tony said. He saw Barnes straighten out of the corner of his eye. “And because I’m supposed to be the best man at Rhodey’s wedding and I’ve been waiting thirty years to tell his wife embarrassing stories about what we got up to in college. And because without me, no one will know how to properly update the code on the bots, so they’ll eventually malfunction and shut down if I’m not here to take care of them.”

He managed to finally look back at Barnes. Barnes stared back at him, a thoughtful cast to his face. 

“What about now?” he asked as Tony met his eyes.

“Now?” Tony shook his head, shoulders loosening as he let out a long breath. “I don’t wake up thinking the world would be better off without me anymore, Barnes,” he said. “I was the Merchant of Death and now I’m Iron Man—I took my second chance and I’m moving forward, doing better. Eventually, that’s enough.”

He was relieved that it seemed like Barnes was actually listening to him, actually considering what he was saying. Tony waited, uneasy, for what would come next, but to his surprise, Barnes gave Dum-E one last pat and turned for the door. Dum-E whined sadly but didn’t follow Barnes. At the door, Barnes paused and looked back.

“You didn’t say anything about Steve,” he said.

“You know what you’ll do to Steve if you die, Barnes,” Tony told him.

Barnes’ flinch meant that was a hit well struck. Tony didn’t regret it—Steve was still his best bet at keeping Barnes from continuing his self-destructive streak. Barnes shook his head.

“You know… Don’t call me that anymore.”

“What?”

Barnes gave him a look. “ _Barnes_ ,” he said with an uncanny approximation of Tony’s intonation. “Stop it. You call everyone else by their first names and I haven’t been Barnes since basic.”

Tony’s eyes narrowed, feeling defensive for some reason. “I’m not calling you _Bucky_. I’d feel like I’m talking to a squirrel or something.”

Barnes looked amused all of a sudden. “I have a first name, you know.”

Tony blinked. “James?”

Barnes nodded. “Call me James,” he said and disappeared through the door.

* * *

“You really build all the armor for the team?”

“Of course.”

“And the weapons?”

“Yup.”

“But you’re still working for your company, right? Making tech and stuff? I saw the release of those new robot bees—”

“Pepper’s CEO now, but I work as head of R&D and I’m a majority shareholder. Why the sudden interest, James? You want to buy some shares?”

“Don’t you ever _sleep_?”

“Eh. Sleep’s overrated.”

“It’s just—you’re Iron Man and you make all this stuff for us and you’re at your company, it just seems like—”

“I’m good at time management. Next topic.”

“Tony—”

“Next topic.”

* * *

“She begged with me. Pleaded. She was crying when I killed her.”

“James. You were _made_ to kill her. There’s a difference.”

“You keep saying that, but I’m not seeing one. I pulled the trigger, I put the gun to her head.”

“Would you have, if HYDRA hadn’t brainwashed you? Hadn’t tortured you?”

“I—No, of course not. But that’s—”

“You fought them so much they had to put you under after every mission. Even just torture didn’t work; they had to wipe your memories and even then, you were still fighting them.”

“But I _didn’t_ fight them! I just did what they ordered me to do!”

“How did they order you to kill her, James?”

“What?” 

“This woman?”

“She—they wanted me to cut off her hands. She was… she had turned spy, given Russian secrets to the Americans. They wanted me to make an example of her.”

“Did you?”

“No. I shot her in the head.”

“That sounds like mercy to me, buddy. You made sure she wasn’t tortured, let her die painlessly.”

“That’s not—That’s _not_ what happened. Don’t twist it like I did some good thing!”

“James—”

“No! No!”

“James!”

* * *

“I can’t believe you don’t like Star Wars. What kind of heathen are you?”

“It’s fine. I just don’t really get why everyone loves it so much. It’s just a wacky sci-fi movie.”

“A _wacky_ … Oh my god.”

“What? It _is_.”

“Of course it is! But it’s also one of the most interesting and original science-fiction ideas to come out of this half of the century and it’s redefined the genre! It’s full of iconic characters and strange and complex world-building and, most importantly, it’s _fun_!”

“Hm.”

“Hm? _Hm_? What’s the supposed to mean?”

“Oh, nothing. I guess I just didn’t realize you were a big nerd.”

“ _Excuse_ me?”

“You gonna start speaking in Klingon now?”

“That’s not even the right _reference_ , you dinosaur.”

“It’s not?”

“That’s _Star Trek_.”

“Star… Trek?”

“Oh my god.”

“Tony? What’s Star Trek?”

“ _Oh my God_. Come with me right now.”

* * *

“So you went to MIT at 14, huh? Howard must’ve shit a brick.”

“That’s one way to say it.”

“What’s another?”

“Didn’t Steve warn you about talking to me about him?”

“He said a lot of wishy-washy stuff about it making you uncomfortable. I thought it was because they died.”

“That’s not it. I mean, that _did_ suck, but that’s not why. Howard wasn’t any great loss.”

“I guess I get that.”

“Oh, _really_? I thought you and my dad got along? Steve always seems to remember him as a pal.”

“Sure, he was a nice enough guy. Outfitted us, got us the tech we needed. A good ally. But from what I remember, he was never big on sharing credit or letting anyone else in the room be smarter than him. Wouldn’t have been easy, being his kid, I bet.”

“...Yeah. That’s one way to look at it.”

“Tony?”

“It’s nothing.”

* * *

“You ever think about cutting your hair?”

“I used to. Back when I first came here.”

“Why?”

“You know what I was like when I showed up here.”

“Well, yeah. You barely knew who you were. Nat was convinced you were going to murder us all in our sleep.”

“She wasn’t wrong. I was holding on by a thread.”

“So?”

“Steve showed me a lot of pictures, trying to jog my memory, keep me grounded. My hair….”

“Huh. You did have short hair back in the day, I guess. So why didn’t you cut it?”

“...”

“James?”

“I spent seventy years as a weapon, Tony. I can’t go back to being—that guy, the one with short hair and the smiles. It’s not me, not anymore.”

“No. I guess not.”

“I can barely even remember anything from before the war and what I do remember is so hazy it might as well be a dream. I’m not _him_ anymore. If I cut my hair, I’d just be—”

“—pretending, yeah. I get it.”

“Yeah.”

“Well. The Spiderkid tells me man buns are hot right now, so—”

“Tony!”

* * *

“What happened in Afghanistan?”

“Oh, that? Just a bit of a kerfluffle, snowflake. I barely even remember it.”

“That sounds like bullshit to me, Tony.”

“I am the king of bullshit.”

“Tony.”

“What? Isn’t it all in my file anyway?”

“ _What_ file?”

“I don’t know! I just always imagined some big fat file floating around somewhere on those leaked SHIELD files. Maybe with _we hate Tony Stark_ written on the front.”

“Tony, all I know is what Steve will tell me.”

“And what’s that?”

“You were there for three months with the Ten Rings. You built the Iron Man armor and escaped. That’s it.”

“...”

“Tony?”

“Fine. Fine! They wanted me to make a weapon, okay? A missile. I said no, so they convinced me.”

“Convinced you? How?”

“They said _pretty please_ and made me a cake.”

“Tony.”

“How do you _think_ , Hagan Daaz? They tortured me.” 

“They—”

“Waterboarded me, yeah. 

“...HYDRA. Liked using cattle-prods.”

“ _Cattle-prods_?”

“When I… didn’t follow mission parameters.”

“Jesus wept. Well. Sometimes they’d get the car battery wet when they were busy with me.”

“Car battery?”

“Yeah, it was… it was keeping me alive. Before the reactor, I mean. I got shrapnel in it when they kidnapped me and a doctor there cut me open and put the battery in to keep it from reaching my heart. I managed to build the arc reactor before the battery gave out entirely, though.”

“The reactor’s _in_ your chest?”

“Yeah. Anyway, I blasted those fuckers to pieces when I made the first suit and blew out of there.”

“What happened to the doctor?”

“What?”

“The one who saved your life? What happened to him?”

“He died.”

“Tony—”

“Nope. Nope, nope, nope, story time’s over.”

* * *

“Are you teaching my very advanced helper robot, that I made with my blood and sweat and sheer genius, how to play _fetch_ , James?”

“Yeah. For a very advanced helper robot, he’s pretty bad at it. You sure you’re a genius?”

* * *

“Do you really hate Steve?”

“I don’t hate Steve.”

“You two fight all the time—”

“Sometimes I want to punch Steve in his perfect, morally righteous teeth, but I don’t hate him. He’s too nice to hate.”

“...Do you _like_ him?”

“What’s with that weird emphasis? Why are you waggling your eyebrows at me?”

“I mean… it _is_ okay now, right?”

“ _What_ is okay—? Oh. Oh! Yeah, that’s fine now.”

“And all the stories about you…. They say—”

“That I’m not picky. Yeah. But I still don’t _like_ Steve. Not like that. I may not be picky, but I’m not delusional.”

“What?”

“What do you mean, what? I know you’ve known him since he was tiny and sickly, but he’s basically a walking underwear ad right now, you know that, right? Plus he’s Captain America. Why set myself up for failure?”

“....”

“What?”

“You seriously think _Steve’s_ out of _your_ league?” 

“He’s not even _in_ my league, Barnes.”

“I told you, it’s _James_.”

“James. It’s a moot point. I don’t like him like that anyway.”

“All right, Tony. Whatever you say.”

* * *

“—and that’s when Dum Dum let out the biggest sneeze you’ve ever heard in your damn life.”

“Oh, God. Don’t tell me—”

“Yeah. They knew we were there right away. Had a hell of a time fighting our way out.”

“What’d Cap do after?”

“Told Dum to bring a fucking hankie next time.”

“Cap really said _fucking_?”

“Uh.”

“I didn’t _think_ so. Not that I’d really know—he never talks about this stuff. Not to me, anyway.”

“I don’t think he likes thinking about it.”

“You do?”

“It helps, sometimes. Remembering that I was a person before all of… this happened. Keeps me from losing my head.”

“Are you sorry you didn’t see them again? The Commandos?”

“Pretty sure Gabe would kill me himself for having the nerve to not get older. He was always bitter about how much better looking I was.”

“Ha! Getting some of your old ego back, huh, Barnes?”

“Is it ego when it’s a fact?”

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it, that’s what I always say. What about the others?”

“Dum Dum would probably want to show me everything I’d missed. Falsworth and Morita would have _so_ many questions. Peggy would yell at me for disappearing and then probably fix everything for me so I could live how I wanted. She was efficient like that.”

“Sounds like her to me.”

“You know Peggy?”

“Uh.”

“Tony?”

“Okay, look, you _can’t_ tell Steve. It’s weird enough with the Howard stuff. But, um. Peggy was my godmother.”

“ _What_?”

“She and Howard got really close after the war! I don’t know. She visited a lot when I was a kid. You know she used to tell me stories about you and Cap.”

“Really? What’d she say?”

“Oh, not much. Just that you had crooked teeth and couldn’t shoot worth a damn and snored like a train engine—”

“Tony!”

“Oh don’t pout, sugar plum, I’m kidding. She told me the usual stuff. _Best friends on the battlefield and off_ and all that jazz. She said she thought it had broken Steve’s heart, losing you like he did.”

“...”

“Oh, James—”

“I have to go.” 

* * *

“What were you trying to do, stepping in and keeping me from fighting?”

Tony had learned over the past few weeks that sometimes it was better not to look at James when they had these little late-night talks of theirs. He focused on the complicated circuitry of James’ arm instead and hummed distractedly. He could feel James staring down at his bent head, but he didn’t look up.

“I knew why you were fighting,” he finally said. “I knew that you needed it. Taking it away was the only way I figured I could pressure you enough to finally admit _why_ you needed it.”

James made a strange sound in the back of his throat. “You could have gotten hurt,” he said. “And you stopped me from helping the others too. What if they got hurt because I didn’t help them?”

God, he really was a mirror. Sometimes it felt like all of Tony’s own fears were being reflected back at him. 

“They’re all big boys and girls,” Tony told him. “They can take care of themselves.”

“We’re a _team_.”

“Yeah. Which means knowing when you _need_ to step in and when you’re just doing it because you’re spoiling for a fight.”

James was silent for a long time. Tony kept working on his arm, waiting. Sometimes James needed to think over what he was going to say before he said it, a concept Tony was familiar with only in theory. 

“It wasn’t always because I wanted to fight,” he said. “I don’t… I don’t want any of you to get hurt. That shouldn’t happen to any of you.”

He sounded young, vulnerable. Tony’s hand tightened on the screwdriver he was holding. Damn it. 

“James. It shouldn’t happen to you, either.”

James jerked a little and Tony finally forced himself to look up at him. James wasn’t looking at Tony, though, he was staring at the wall over Tony’s head, his mouth a hard line.

“It’s better if it’s me, isn’t it?” James asked through gritted teeth. “I can take it. I can recover quickly. And I’m—well. I’m the Winter Soldier.”

 _I’m a monster,_ Tony heard. He wondered if there would ever be a day when James felt like a person instead. It had taken Tony a long time to begin seeing himself as one. 

“Steve can heal quickly, too,” Tony said. “Should he be taking all the hits for the team?”

“What? No! No, of course not.”

“Then why should you?”

James thought about that. Tony let him and set to work on recalibrating the vents on James’s shoulder. They weren’t opening as fluidly as they should. Tony worked in silence for several minutes before James spoke again.

“Doing this, being an Avenger… it’s not just about helping people for me. It’s—”

“Atonement.” Tony glanced up through his eyelashes. He smiled a little grimly at the surprise on James’s face. “You think I don’t know about that? It doesn’t change anything. We are not your responsibility, James. Let us take care of ourselves.”

“You’ve been taking care of me,” James told him.

Tony raised his eyebrows. He let his stare linger until James realized exactly what he’d said and began to go a little pink around the ears. 

“You know what I mean,” he muttered.

Tony took pity on him. “You’re in a dark place,” he said. “And I never risked my life unnecessarily when I was pulling you out of the fire.”

“Didn’t you? With those Doombots—”

“—it was a calculated risk,” Tony said. James frowned at him. “Look, you’re a superhero like the rest of us, okay? That means sometimes you make the call that you need to put yourself in danger. But that’s not what you were doing, James. It wasn’t about taking care of us—it was about not taking care of _yourself_.”

James let out a long breath. “I can’t just ignore it when you’re in trouble,” he said.

“I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to trust us. We might be a bunch of misfits, but we’re actually pretty good at this gig. We can handle it. And,” he poked his screwdriver gently into James' cheek, “I don’t know about the others, but I’m not going to be an excuse for you to kill yourself, James. I’ve got too much blood on my hands already. I don’t want any more.”

James jerked back. He stared at Tony, his eyes wide and his mouth tight. Tony stared back firmly. _Come on, James,_ he thought. Finally, James’ mouth softened. His eyebrows came down and his shoulders slumped. Tony relaxed too, a little. 

“What am I supposed to do?”

“Let us handle ourselves,” Tony said. “Try to come back without any more bruises. Find something to make getting hurt the worst thing you can think about.”

James shook his head. “Is that what you did?”

“Yeah,” Tony said, so bald about it that he even surprised himself. James blinked. “I stopped throwing myself into fights and giving out my address to terrorists. I had Pepper. It took a long time, James, but every day was one step further away from the man I’d been and that made it easier.”

James hummed. They spent the rest of their session in silence, but Tony was hopeful anyway. 

* * *

“He will never fully recover, you know.”

“Jesus _Christ_ , Natasha.” Tony forcefully set down the empty cup he’d nearly launched at her head. He pointed an accusing finger at her. “We’ve talked about this! I know you think it’s funny, but I’m already two bad scares away from a heart attack and I’m not about that!”

Natasha didn’t quirk her eyebrow and roll her eyes like she usually did when Tony complained at her. Her arms were crossed over her chest, her face was set in a still mask. Tony frowned at her. 

“I know he won’t recover entirely,” he said. “You can’t break something without losing pieces of it.”

“You’re trying to pick up the pieces. Rearrange them.”

“Not rearrange them. Just keep him from breaking them again.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Tony. He’s not an engine or a robot. You can’t _remake_ him.”

“Who said anything about remaking? I’m not interested in that, Nat. I just want something that _works_. You know that.”

She hummed. “Is that what all those late-night talks have been about? Making him work?”

Tony’s neck heated. “You know about those, huh?”

Natasha finally unclenched. She reached out and flicked Tony on the nose, her eyebrow going up in her usual form of mocking amusement.

“I know all,” she said. “So don’t fuck this up, Tony.”

He offered her a salute. She rolled her eyes but disappeared without another word.

* * *

The next week, new SHIELD sent out a call for help dealing with some AIM wannabes causing a scene in Brooklyn. 

When they landed, Tony looked at James, considering. For the past month, he’d been sticking to James like glue, enforcing his safety. It was the first time they’d come out since James had started visiting Tony’s workshop during the night. Tony found, to his own surprise, that he didn’t feel like he _needed_ to shadow James to make sure he wouldn’t be getting into fights just to get himself hurt. 

James looked at Tony, a question in his eyes, and Tony came to an abrupt decision.

“I’m with Barton today,” he said.

Looks were exchanged. Their teammates were not stupid people—they’d realized what was going on and probably knew exactly what the significance of Tony deciding to shadow someone else in a fight was. 

But none of them asked. Tony looked away from James’ burning eyes as Clint bumped his shoulder against Tony’s with a friendly grin.

“You’re my chauffeur today, then? Gonna be my personal limo service?”

“You better tip,” Tony told him. 

He didn’t look at James again as he lifted off with Clint clinging to his back like a baby monkey. He was going out on a limb, trusting James not to get himself in trouble that Tony needed to pull him out of. It wasn’t in Tony’s nature to trust people, not after everything he’d been through, but all he could do was hope that James wouldn’t betray it. He forcefully didn’t examine why he was trusting James at all in the first place—down that road laid madness, and all that.

It was easy to find the commotion—about a dozen guys were wreaking havoc in downtown Brooklyn. They weren’t much in themselves, but their weapons were advanced enough to give them an edge. Tony grimaced as he swooped down to try and take some of them out—fighting AIM always made him feel vaguely dirty. 

Clint fired repeatedly from Tony’s back as he swooped in and out, whooping in his ear. Tony kept part of his attention on the conversations on the comms to keep track of the others when he couldn’t see them, so he knew when Natasha took a hard hit, when Steve requested backup, when Sam cracked a joke. 

James was silent. Tony could only hope that was a good sign.

“Wait, wait, wait,” Clint said after about twenty minutes of furious fighting. Half of the AIM guys were down, but the rest were looking increasingly nasty. “Look! There!”

He pointed. Tony followed his finger and swore under his breath. Reinforcements were coming down the street toward their fight, an entire squad with heavier artillery and nastier guns. They’d be on the others in less than a minute.

“Cap, we’ve got company. Hawkeye and I are taking to the ground,” Tony said. “Air support’s down for the count until further notice.”

“Copy, Iron Man,” Steve said. He’d never gotten over that habit. “Be careful.”

Tony landed in a crouch, allowing Clint to springboard off his back and at the group of reinforcements with an incomprehensible battle yell. There weren’t that many of them, thankfully—less than half a dozen. But they definitely had nastier weapons than the fools that Steve and the others were grappling with. Someone had been messing with alien tech again, Tony thought. Aliens really were the worst thing to happen to New York City crime rates.

He ducked a blast and came up swinging. He was surprised when his target managed to keep his ground, meeting Tony’s hit cleanly. Tony’s eyes narrowed and the man grinned at him. 

“What’s the matter, Iron Man?” he asked. “Feeling a little old today? A little _human_?”

His eyes began to glow. Extremis, and not the semi-stable form that Tony had managed to get working with Helen Cho’s help. This was the unstable version, _Killian’s_ version. Tony scowled and leaped back away from the punch aimed for his stomach. He’d done his best to update the armor against Extremis-enhanced people, but no matter how advanced it was, it was still metal and all metal had a breaking point. Fuck, fuck, fuck. 

He glanced over. Clint was still fighting, having his own troubles. It didn’t look like the guys on him were enhanced, but they were still much better trained than the average muscle. Clint didn’t look hurt, but that was only a matter of time. 

“You think you’re safe to look away from me?”

Tony dodged another swipe and risked one more look toward the battle still taking place behind them. He didn’t catch much—just a glimpse of Steve and Natasha back-to-back, Sam near them, James with his gun. They were still fighting, too. If Tony lifted off, this guy would hurtle right into them. 

Damn it.

“Come on, big guy,” Tony said, settling into place and holding his ground. “Time for some field tests for my new armor alloy.”

“Iron Man?” Steve asked in his ear, sounding alarmed. “What are you talking about?”

“Focus on your own guy, Cap,” Tony said just as he went flying.

He hit the pavement hard. The suit’s padding protected him, but he still felt the reverberation of the hit in his bones. He gritted his teeth against the pain and got to his feet. His opponent was smiling as he bore down on Tony. Tony couldn’t block him—one right move and he’d make a dent in the armor with that enhanced strength of his. 

No, all Tony could do was dodge and weave, hoping that he would burn himself out before getting close enough to do damage. From the way his skin was looking, it wouldn’t be long. The single advantage of the mutated Extremis was that it had such a short shelf-life—Tony had never seen anyone outside of Pepper last more than an hour using it to its full potential. 

“Stay _still_ ,” the enhanced man growled as Tony ducked his hit again.

“I do that and you’re going to kill me,” Tony said. “Gonna have to give that one a hard pass, buddy.”

“Someone get to Stark!” Clint said. “He’s got an Extremis parasite hanging on him.”

“Iron Man?”

“I’m fine,” Tony said into the comms. His heart beat wildly against his chest. All of his internal sensors were going haywire—adrenaline overflow, irregular heart rate, the whole shebang. He really needed to do something about that, because it wasn’t helping his stress levels at _all_ to actually _see_ what this fight was doing to his body. “No need for backup. Do you hear me, Cap? _No need for backup_.”

If he requested it, James would come running. That was the _last_ thing Tony wanted—at least he had the armor to give him some protection. James was a supersoldier, but Extremis evened that playing field and then some. He’d be more vulnerable than Tony to this guy and Tony wasn’t about to let him take that risk when he was still struggling.

Tony yelped. As he’d been talking, his opponent had gotten too close and grabbed his forearm and closed his fist with his full strength. The armor groaned, cracking. Tony bore the pain of the increasing pressure grimly, refusing to yell. He forced himself to focus and brought his other fist in a hard punch and managed to get enough space to scramble away. His arm throbbed, all but useless. Damn it.

“Tony!”

“I’m _fine_ , snowflake!” Tony said. “Stop distracting me!”

He ignored the chatter that exploded over the comms and focused on the fight. The enhanced man’s skin was glowing now—it was only a matter of time until he went off. It dawned on Tony with sudden horror that the problem then would be containing the radius of the explosion. Shit, he was going to _explode_. There was no telling if the others would be far enough away to be unaffected by the blast, but Tony knew for sure that he and Clint wouldn’t be. 

He needed to get the enhanced out of there. 

If he ran, tried to draw the man away, there’d be the risk of exposing civilians in the area. Most of them had cleared out, but there was a chance there were still people hiding in the nearby buildings. Tony couldn’t risk that, but if they kept fighting here, they’d all go up in a poof. Tony could try taking him out entirely with rockets, but there was no guarantee that they wouldn’t just set him off as well as kill him. The same went for knocking him out.

Tony went over his options as they fought, brain whirring. There were a lot of paths he could take, but every one of them came with unacceptable risks and too many gambles. Except, Tony thought as a plan began to dawn on him, one. There was one where all the danger would be for Tony himself. A calculated risk. Tony had to take it.

He kept the fight going, watching the enhanced man’s skin closely. He had to time this precisely right or he’d end up fried too. 

“Tony, you look like you’re getting—”

“I’ve _got_ this,” Tony snapped into the feeds. “Remember what we talked about, ice pop? Worry about yourself.”

“But—”

“James.” Tony ducked another swipe and leaped backward. “I’ve got it.”

James fell silent. Tony ducked and weaved and tried to keep his fight from spilling over onto anyone else. Soon, soon, it was almost time. The enhanced man was practically glowing now, his skin cracking with red lines. His fighting was sloppier too now that he was angry that it was taking him so long to pin Tony down. He was losing any rationality thanks to Extremis. It would be easy to grab him. This would _work_.

The enhanced man roared and his skin began to crackle. _Time_.

Tony leaped for him. The enhanced didn’t have a chance to withdraw as Tony grabbed him around the middle and heaved him up into the sky, flying at his full speed. The enhanced man didn’t go without a struggle—he punched and pounded on the armor, his strength making it dent and creak. Tony could feel the blows even through the metal and gritted his teeth and kept flying. 

“ _NO!_ ” the enhanced yelled in Tony’s ear. 

He sounded inhumane. It wouldn’t be long. Tony kept flying and flying. They were well above the skyline now, well above any buildings, high in the clouds. 

The enhanced man screamed again. “LET ME GO!” 

“You got it,” Tony said and released him. 

The enhanced man began to fall with a scream. Tony’s body throbbed with pain. He waited for five seconds, then followed the trajectory of the falling body with his heart in his throat. If he’d calculated wrong, the enhanced man would hit the ground before he went off and this all would be for nothing—

Something grabbed Tony’s ankle, sending him into a tailspin. He could feel the pressure building from the strong grip. He swore and looked down. The enhanced man had grabbed onto him, sneering up at him. 

“I’ll take you down with me!” he screamed. 

His grip was too tight. Tony swore again, trying to shake him off. When that didn’t work, he risked a blaster and sighed with relief when it separated them. His boot wasn’t working any longer, though—all the connectors had been crushed and it wasn’t working anymore. Tony struggled to regain his balance, trying to stabilize his flight pattern. With only one boot, it was nearly impossible and he found himself falling, falling—

He lined up with the enhanced man in the air. They were still above the buildings, but not for long—it would only take seconds before they would hit the pavement. Tony was trying to lessen his speed with his single boot and his hand repulsors, but it wasn’t working very well. He swore, sweat pouring down his back. His ankle felt like it was on fire. 

The enhanced man reached for him. Tony swore again as he punched Tony in the chest. Tony’s panic tripled as he felt the arc reactor ripple from the blow. The arc reactor was made of sturdier stuff than the armor, nigh on indestructible, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be weakened or damaged. Oh, no, Tony thought. Oh, fuck.

The enhanced punched it again. They were almost to the buildings now and Tony’s chest felt like it was going to explode. No, no, no—

The enhanced man punched out a third time then began to scream and scream and scream. Tony, weak and wheezing, used the last of his energy to add some speed to his fall, not caring if that meant he’d hit the pavement in a splat so long as it got him away from the enhanced who was about to—

_BOOM!_

Tony was pushed down from the concussive force of the enhanced man’s explosion. He tumbled to the ground at an alarming speed and braced himself for the impact that would almost surely kill him, suit or no suit. Oh, God, he thought. He didn’t want this to happen, he didn’t want—

Something rammed into him, sending him flying sideways. Tony lost all control of his descent, tumbling head over foot without any idea of what was up and what was down. Confusing as it was, he had no idea he was even close to the ground until he hit it with a hard, painful thump. He groaned, entire body throbbing. His vision was still spinning.

“—ony! Tony!”

His ears rang. There was too much noise—the frantic beep of the suit warning him of the damage to his body, the shouting over the comms and over his head. Tony’s head swam. Alive, he thought dazedly. I’m alive.

“Tony!”

“Here,” Tony mumbled. 

“Oh thank _God—_ ”

“What the hell was he thinking—”

“Barnes, that was a hell of a catch, man—”

“Jesus Christ, look at the reactor! His _armor_.”

“Guys, I don’t think Tony—”

Tony’s chest felt too heavy, too tight. The sensors in the suit had been going off for so long that he didn’t know what was really happening to his body anymore, but he started to gasp as the tightness in his chest increased. He couldn’t breathe.

“I can’t—” he gasped into the comms. “Help—Breathe—!”

“Something’s wrong!”

“Well, yeah, he just got crushed by that human destructo machine. Look at the _dents_ on him, Jesus.”

“No, we need to get the armor off of him, something’s _wrong—_ ”

Tony couldn’t feel the hands on the armor, though there were sensors for pressure all over the outside. He wheezed, trying to get his breath back, but the band kept tightening around his chest until even gasping was painful. His vision was going spotty and black. Fuck. 

Someone found the hidden cache for the helmet. It slid back and Tony blinked up into sunlight and James’s concerned face hanging over his. When he saw Tony, James’s expression went through a whole face journey—relief, anger, abject terror. Tony had never seen him so expressive before. He wanted to tease him for it, make a joke, but he couldn’t gather the breath to say anything.

“He’s having a heart attack,” James said. 

“How do you—”

“Something must have damaged the reactor. Come on, come _on—_ ”

Tony took the deepest breath he could around the tightening band and forced himself to wheeze out, “Underarm!”

James understood, luckily. He found the hidden catch for the torso armor and flicked it. The torso piece dropped from Tony with a thud. It was heavily dented, almost crushed. Tony looked down and grimaced. The arc reactor was still on, still flickering, but the surface had cracked. It wasn’t broken, but it had dinged badly enough to set off a reaction in Tony’s heart. Fuck.

“Come on, Tony,” James said. He put his hands on Tony’s chest. “Идем!”

Tony’s vision was going back. He fumbled to reach up. He put his hand over the one James had on his chest, covering his arc reactor. He squeezed James’s fingers.

“Fine,” he forced himself to say. “I’ll be _fine_.”

If James said anything more, Tony didn’t hear it. He’d already surrendered to the blackness.

* * *

_Beep, beep, beep…. Beep, beep, beep…_

Tony woke to a headache, a body that felt like it weighed three thousand pounds, and a supersoldier sleeping by his bedside.

It took several seconds to realize he wasn’t in a hospital but in Bruce’s lab. He relaxed a little at that. Tony hated hospitals. They smelled bad, the furniture was uncomfortable, and the food tasted horrible—not to mention, they had boring rules about what Tony was and wasn’t allowed to do when he was injured. The last time he’d been in the hospital, he remembered getting a two-hour lecture on why he was _not_ allowed to experiment on the medical equipment surrounding his bed and no it _doesn’t_ matter how bored you are, Mr. Stark, those machines are helping to _keep you alive_. Boring.

But Bruce’s little medical wing was fine. Bruce never told Tony he couldn’t do work and he usually sat with Tony to talk about their latest experiment or argue some weird science fiction physics with him. 

Tony turned his head and blinked. Someone had bought a little bear and put it on his bedside table. It was holding a cheesy heart in its little paws that read _WE MISS YOU BEARY MUCH_! Tony would bet five dollars that buying it had been Clint’s idea. 

He turned his head again and considered Steve, scrunched into the little armchair by the bed, fast asleep. It had to be hell on his back, considering he could barely fit in it, but Steve had probably fallen asleep in more uncomfortable places. Tony cleared his throat and ended up with a coughing fit. His throat was so dry that coughing was actually painful. 

A straw was pressed to his lips. Tony drank deeply and sighed in relief at the feeling of water on his abused throat. His coughing subsided and he looked up into Steve’s concerned face. 

“We should get you a nurse’s uniform,” Tony rasped out. “You’d rock it.”

Steve’s face did something funny, like he was torn between laughing and socking Tony in the jaw. He settled on rolling his eyes as he set the water to the side. 

“Glad to see you didn’t break your sense of humor,” he said.

“If my humor’s gone, I’m probably dead,” Tony agreed. Steve flinched. Ah, Tony thought. Probably better not to joke about it right now. “How long have I been out?”

“A couple of days,” Steve said. “Bruce said you had a concussion.”

“Just a concussion?” Steve hesitated and Tony sighed. “It’s not my first trip in this rodeo, Cap. Just tell me.”

Steve sighed. “That AIM guy, he did a number on you. Your ankle and your arm are both bruised up and Bruce says you bruised your ribs, too. He was the most worried about your heart attack, though. Your heart stopped on the way to the Tower, Tony. He could barely get it started up again.”

Tony looked down at his chest. To his surprise, his arc reactor looked fine. No damage. He looked back up at Steve who smiled ruefully.

“Bucky’s a lot smarter than anyone realizes,” he said. “The moment we got you in the Quinjet he called Miss Potts. He figured if anyone knew how to change it out, it would be her. She got your backup and changed it right after they got your heart beating again.”

Good old Pepper. Tony wondered how James had guessed she would know about the back-up reactor, but he guessed it didn’t matter now. He frowned, looking down at himself. Something wasn’t adding up here. 

“It’s just bruising, then?” he said, skeptical. “No broken bones, nothing? I _fell_ , Cap.”

“I know,” Steve said, his face pained. “Tony, what the hell were you thinking? You could’ve _died_.”

Ah. It was time for _that_ fight. Tony wondered if Steve would believe it if he pretended to go back to sleep right then. From the hard look in Steve’s eye, he doubted it.

“He was a human bomb, Cap,” Tony said grimly. “If he went off on the street, we all would’ve died. Bringing him up was the only way to guarantee minimal damage.”

Steve’s face twisted. “Except for you,” he said. 

“I calculated the risk. And I’m not dead, am I?”

Steve looked at him for a long time. Steve was usually a pretty open guy, but right then Tony couldn’t read anything he was thinking. 

“Thanks to Bucky,” Steve said at last.

“What?”

“When you went up, none of us knew what was going on. We were all busy fighting and even when Clint told us you’d taken off, we didn’t know why. But Bucky must have guessed. He told Sam to take him up as high as he could the moment we saw you and he… He _grabbed_ you. I’ve never tried anything like that before, but he’s the reason you didn’t hit the ground harder. He stopped your fall.”

“He caught me,” Tony said in disbelief. “Jesus Christ, that _idiot_.”

“If he hadn’t caught you, you probably would have broken your _spine_ , Tony,” Steve said. “If you didn’t just _die_.”

“And he had _no idea_ that he would survive doing a stunt like that!” Tony snapped back. “You guys might be supersoldiers, but you’re not indestructible, you know! Damn it, he’s been doing _better_! He isn’t supposed to be doing risky shit like that anymore!”

Steve’s mouth twisted. “He _has_ been doing better,” he said. “But—”

“Where is he?” Tony demanded. “I need to give him a piece of my mind.”

Steve’s eyebrows lowered. “After he made sure you were going to make it, he took off,” he said. “I haven’t seen him in two days.”

“ _What_?”

Tony’s monitors were beginning to go crazy. It wouldn’t be long now until Bruce showed up and pushed Steve out of the room. Steve probably knew it too because he leaned down over Tony’s bed and spoke very quickly.

“Listen, I don’t know what’s going on between the two of you, but he was a _wreck_ , Tony. I’ve never seen him like that, not once.”

“So?” Tony scowled at him. They both heard footsteps outside of the room. 

Steve’s mouth quirked. “ _So_?” he asked. “So, maybe Bucky’s not the only one who needs to stop taking stupid risks that might get him killed.”

“I didn’t take a _stupid—_ ”

“You nearly died, Tony,” Steve said. “It’s only dumb luck that you didn’t.” Hesitantly, he reached out and pressed his hand to Tony’s forehead. His hand was wide and warm. “I didn’t like seeing that and Bucky _really_ didn’t like seeing it. Maybe consider why that is, yeah?”

Bruce burst into the room before Tony could say anything else. 

“Tony!” Bruce hurried to his side, giving Steve a reproachful look. “You were supposed to get me the minute he woke up, Cap.”

“Sorry,” Steve said sheepishly. 

Tony eyed him. He’d always been a little suspicious that aw-shucks routine. Steve winked at him behind Bruce’s back.

“Lie back,” Bruce told him. “I need to check you for brain damage.”

“Aw, my little pea pod,” Tony said. “You say the sweetest things.”

Bruce snorted and patted Tony’s shoulder. “I’m glad you didn’t die doing that incredibly stupid stunt, Tony,” he said. “Now lie back so I can make sure you didn’t break your dumb genius brain.”

“Oxymoron,” Tony informed him.

“Not for you. I’ve never met anyone who can be the smartest guy in the room and the biggest idiot all at the same time.”

“It’s my special skill.”

Tony realized that Steve had slipped out of the room at some point. As Bruce pushed him back, he scowled. Consider why that is, Steve had said. What did that even mean?

* * *

Bruce’s professional medical opinion was that Tony was lucky to be alive. As it was, due to his burns and the aftereffects of the heart attack, not to mention the bruises and concussion, he was ordered to remain on bed rest for another few days. If he was really good and didn’t whine like a five-year-old, Bruce said, he’d be let out at the end of the week.

Tony had agreed grumpily, mostly because the one time he’d tried to get up to escape he’d collapsed from how badly his ribs hurt. Bruce hadn’t been happy about _that_ either.

Still, it wasn’t so bad. Since he wasn’t in the hospital, he had access to much better food and entertainment than he would’ve otherwise. He still struggled to keep himself from going crazy from being cooped up, though—Bruce had forbidden work, citing too much stress, and there were only so many movies a man could watch. 

The other Avengers helped as best they could—Natasha sat with him and complained about his shitty taste in movies, Clint read to him from his latest trashy romance novel, Steve came to sit with him for several hours, chatting casually. Sam stopped by and brought some music with him. Bruce sat by his bedside every day and they talked about wacky science-fiction physics and the possibility of alternate universes. Even Coulson poked his head in, huffed, and left again. 

Tony chatted and watched terrible movies and did his best not to poke his still-healing injuries. Through it all, James never showed. Not once.

* * *

When Bruce finally released him from his exile, Tony went directly to James’ room. He found Clint and Natasha there, waiting for him, and paused. 

“Okay,” he said slowly, looking between their studiously bored faces. “You guys got something you need to tell me?”

Clint looked at Natasha. Under Tony’s baffled stare, they had a full conversation with their faces alone. Tony had no idea what they were communicating with their eyebrows and pursed mouths, but by the end of it Natasha rolled her eyes and started stalking off. As she passed Tony, she poked him hard in the side. Tony flinched.

“That _hurts_ ,” he called after her. 

“Good,” she said without turning back. “Maybe you’ll remember that for next time.”

Tony scowled. “She’s mean,” he complained to Clint.

“Tell me about it,” Clint said. “But you had it coming. At least she was nice enough to wait until Bruce gave you the all-clear.”

“Look, not that it’s not fun to be abused in my own home so close to my near-death experience, but—”

“Tony.”

Tony shut up. Clint almost never sounded like that, more than halfway to serious. 

“Nat and I, we’ve… well, we’ve been keeping an eye on things,” Clint said. He shifted. Tony realized, taken aback, that Clint was actually _nervous_. What the hell. “I convinced Nat we didn’t need to step in because I thought you had it.”

“You mean James?” Tony asked, baffled.

“You think you’re the only one keeping an eye on things?” Clint asked. He tapped the corner of his eye with a finger. “My nickname isn’t just for kicks, you know? I saw what he was doing to himself, too.”

“Then why didn’t you—”

“It wasn’t my place. And I’m not like you or Steve, I don’t my kicks from sticking my nose in everyone’s business.”

That was a blatant lie—Tony had never met anyone who enjoyed sticking his nose in everyone’s business as much as Clint did. Natasha knew everything because she was scary and efficient—Clint knew everything because he was an incurable gossip.

“He could’ve died, Clint,” Tony said.

Clint shook his head, mouth twisting wryly. “You think he’s the first Russian spy with something to prove I’ve dealt with? Nat was just like him when we brought her in from the cold. Throwing herself into danger because she didn’t care what happened to her, didn’t think about herself at all.”

Tony frowned. “Nat?”

“Yeah. She wasn’t always the queen of ice-cold logic, you know. My point is, I watched her pick herself up and soldier on. Hell, I watched you do it, too. Bucky would’ve too.”

Tony bristled. “So you’re saying—”

“I’m saying you had to help because that’s the kind of guy you are, Tony,” Clint said, his mouth twisting wryly. “You’re such a fucking engineer—you’ve gotta find the fix. But it wasn’t just about Bucky.”

“Of _course_ it was—”

“Oh? Then why’d you fly off with a human bomb, Tony?”

Tony snapped his mouth shut. He glared at Clint and Clint raised an eyebrow. 

“I knew what I was doing,” Tony said.

“Yeah. That’s what Natasha and Bucky thought. I bet that’s what _you_ thought, back when you were giving your home address out to terrorists. Bucky’s more obvious about it, but you’re just as reckless as he is. You’ve just managed to convince yourself you’re not.”

Tony gnawed on the inside of his mouth. “Are you getting a point sometime soon?” he asked.

“You helped Bucky because that’s the kind of guy you are,” Clint said. “But you helped him because he reminded you so much of yourself that you thought if he could get over it, you’d finally be able to, too.”

Tony flinched. Hawkeye’s aim, he acknowledged, was just as good as ever. Clint seemed to recognize the hit he made. His face softened.

“I thought you needed to hear it,” Clint said. “Because if you go into a room with Bucky without knowing about it, things will get ugly quick and I don’t need any more drama in my life. Thor’s making me watch _Grey’s Anatomy_ and I’m already full up on fictional drama at the moment.”

Tony snorted, relaxing a little. “Thor’s _making_ you, huh?” he asked.

Clint didn’t even look remotely ashamed. “I won’t apologize for liking Miranda Bailey, Stark,” he said. “You wish you had half her guts. Now go talk to your boy and remember what I said.”

“He’s not _my_ boy,” Tony snapped. “Besides, I don’t even know where he is.”

Clint grinned. “Aren’t you a genius?” he asked. “Figure it out.”

* * *

Tony called Pepper as soon as Clint cleared out. He’d gone into James’ room just to make sure it was empty. It was pin neat and smelled faintly of plums. James didn’t have anything personal on the walls or the dresser. It looked like a guest room. Tony sat down on the bed as he listened to the phone ring.

“You know where he’s hiding,” he told her.

“You know we’ve talked about starting in the middle of a conversation, Tony,” Pepper said.

“Don’t play dumb, you’re not dumb. Where is he?”

“ _You’re_ not dumb. Why don’t you figure it out yourself?”

Tony scowled. Pepper sighed against his ear. 

“You scared him, Tony,” she said. “I didn’t realize you had grown so close.”

“I’m as surprised as you are,” he said.

“Well, you would be.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you’ve always been remarkably blind to seeing when people actually like having you around. Tony, you know where he is. Why are you calling me?”

Tony didn’t know what to say. He didn’t know why he’d called her. He stared at James’ bedroom, mind whirring. His ankle and chest still hurt but everything else had been mostly patched up. He’d have to take it easy for the next month and watch his bandages carefully, but he was fine. He was fine.

But he kept replaying the fight in his head. The choice had seemed simple, almost clear when he’d made it. Obviously it made more sense for Tony to get an explosive person away from the others and he was the only one equipped to fly high enough. He’d thought about the risks, considered the fact that he’d be hurt by it, might even die. He just… hadn’t cared. His hand tightened around his phone.

“Did you ever wonder about me?” he asked Pepper. “Did you ever think I wanted to… that I wanted…” He couldn’t even say it.

“Oh, Tony.” She sounded sad. “I never had to wonder. When you came back from Afghanistan, it was like you were… I don’t know. Manic. Reckless. You took so many risks, got hurt so many times.”

Tony tapped a restless rhythm against his knee with his free hand. “I don’t anymore,” he said. “I really don’t.”

He _didn’t_ , no matter what Clint said. Maybe he was too careless, but he didn’t want to die anymore. He’d left that behind him. 

“I know that too, Tony.”

“Pep,” he said. “I think I’m going to have to talk about my _feelings_.”

She laughed in his ear. “Good luck, Mr. Stark,” she said and hung up on him.

* * *

The workshop was quiet and dark when Tony stepped inside. That didn’t mean much. Tony stretched, ignoring the pain in his leg and ambled to where the bots were quietly recharging. He turned them on one by one. 

“Hey guys,” he said quietly as they whirred to life, beeping at him. “Daddy’s home. Did you miss me?”

He ran a hand over Dum-E and patted U and Butterfingers. They whirred around the workshop, happy to be active. Tony watched them for a long moment then made his way to the lumpy couch he’d installed in the workshop back when he’d first moved back into the tower. He lowered himself onto it with a groan and tilted his head back, closing his eyes.

“Well?” he asked. “Did you miss me?”

A hand rested in Tony’s hair. “Why would I miss you?” James asked. “You’re nothing but trouble.”

Tony smiled. “I have it on good authority you _like_ trouble, James Buchanon.”

“Whose authority is that, then?”

“Steve’s.”

James grumbled. “Talk about _trouble_.”

Tony opened his eyes. James’s voice was light, teasing, but his face was pinched and tense. He looked terrible—between the wan skin, dark circles, and unkempt hair, it was clear that he probably hadn’t slept for the last few days and hadn’t been taking care of himself. As soon as Tony opened his eyes, James took his hand out of Tony’s hair. For a long moment, they stared at each other.

“You look like shit, ice pop,” Tony said.

James’ face darkened. Tony winced. 

“I wonder why that is,” James bit out. “Maybe it’s because someone I know ended up nearly dying in my arms?”

Tony scowled at him. “I’m _fine_ ,” he said. He spread his arms. “See? Not a scratch.”

Not strictly true considering the bruises he still had, but James’ wild eyes meant that he probably shouldn’t hear about those. 

“You nearly _weren’t_ fine” James turned away from Tony, his hands clenching and unclenching. “Your heart _stopped_ , Tony! If it wasn’t for Miss Potts... “ He took in a deep, shuddery breath and turned back to Tony with blazing eyes. “You’re the one who’s been telling _me_ I don’t need to throw my life away for other people and then you turn around and do this? You’re a fucking _hypocrite_.”

“I wasn’t going to _throw my life away_ ,” Tony said, bristling. “You’ve been fighting fights that you didn’t need to just to get punched—I did this because we all would have literally died if I hadn’t.”

“And you didn’t stop to think at all about how fucked we’d all be if you died in the process, did you?” James asked. He ran a harried hand through his hair, pacing around the workshop like a caged animal. Tony watched him warily. “I thought you wanted to give that mean speech at Rhodes’ wedding?”

“James—”

“And what about the bots, huh? I don’t know how to update them. Without you, they’ll stop working. Did you think about that at all, Tony?”

“ _James_.”

“And what about _me_?” James roared, pushing the nearest table with his metal hand, sending it sailing into the wall. Tony jumped. “Who the hell am I going to talk to if you’re not here, huh? Who’s going to call me stupid nicknames and fix my arm and listen to everything I say without blinking. Huh?!”

Tony stared. James was breathing heavily, his hair a wild wreck and his eyes dark. He didn’t look like the Winter Soldier at all—he looked _alive_. Tony released a long, hard breath. Fucking Clint, he thought nonsensically. 

“I’m sorry,” he said.

James blinked. The fight drained out of him all at once. “What?”

“Turn your hearing aid up, grandpa. I _said_ I’m sorry.” Tony ran a hand through his hair. “It was a stupid thing to do. I didn’t think about what was going to happen to me. I still don’t think there was a better way to do it, but… I’m sorry.” He offered James a weak smile. “I guess even the best therapy money can buy can’t give me better self-preservation. That’s fucked up, huh?”

James' face crumpled a little. "You were the one telling me you'd moved forward," he said. "You told me—!"

"I know." Tony shook his head. "This wasn't me being suicidal, James. This was just my usual recklessness. Turns out I'll never really move past that." 

He was so concerned by the way James was looking at him that he flinched back a little when James started marching towards him. James paused and his face shifted, softening. He approached more slowly. Tony watched, confused, as James reached out and touched his hair. The gentle hand felt nice. Tony tilted his head into it with a questioning noise.

“Tony,” James said and then they were kissing.

James had a curiously soft mouth for a renowned assassin. Tony sighed into it, relaxing entirely. James’ hand moved to cup the back of his head, his hold gentle and steady. Tony could feel his heart beating in his ears, could taste the salt on James’ lips. His mind was a rush of white noise.

James pulled back. His face was wary but his eyes were bright, alight. He looked more like the James Barnes Tony had grown up hearing stories about than he ever had before. Tony’s heart did something strange, a leap or a thud. He rubbed his chest. 

“You…” Tony cleared his throat when his voice came out low and hoarse, ignoring the way James’ eyes darkened for the sake of his own sanity. “You left out liking guys during our little talk about Steve, snowflake.”

“I wasn’t sure I wanted you to know then,” James said.

“But you’re sure now?”

James’ cocked an eyebrow. “That’s what a kiss usually means, yeah.”

Tony shook his head. “You’re seriously—Two months ago you couldn’t even talk to me.”

“Two months ago, we were pretending that we had nothing in common,” James said. “Now we know better, don’t we?” He softened a little. “If you say no, I’ll never bring it up again,” he said. “But, Tony when I thought you were dead, I—” He shook his head. “I’ve never felt like that before. Not in my entire life.”

“James…” Tony hesitated, then reached out to take James’ hand in his own. “You know it’s going to happen again. Me getting hurt. You were right before—that _is_ part of the gig.”

“Just like you know it’s going to happen again for me,” James said, squeezing Tony’s fingers. “How about this; I’ll make a deal with you. I won’t do things that might get me killed if you don’t.”

Tony began to smile. “Are you _bargaining_ me out of putting myself in danger?” he asked, delighted.

James’ eyes brightened. “I don’t know,” he said. “Is it working?” 

Tony leaned in. “James Buchanon,” he said against James’ smiling mouth, “I think you’ve got yourself a deal.”

**Author's Note:**

> and they lived happily ever after & mostly managed to stop nearly killing themselves for other people like self-destructive morons. 
> 
> thanks for reading! comments & kudos always appreciated.


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